Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Melbourne, in Carlton at the [Royal] Women’s Hospital in August 1921. In my early years we

lived in Kensington, which is a suburb of Melbourne, and them moved around a fair bit. I went to school in several different places.

I was born in the [Royal] Women’s Hospital in Melbourne on the 13th of August 1921.

My early schooling took place around Melbourne in various suburbs, initially in Kensington and around about those suburbs in that area. Because my mother was separated from my father, and this was back during the Depression years, when I was 14, it was essential that I got to work so my

education level was rather limited. So I worked for a short time and then I was apprenticed as a rotary printing machinist at a company in Collingwood (inner eastern Melbourne suburb). Then came the war and I enlisted, I attempted to enlist in early 1941 at a time when I was 19 years of age.

Eventually, I was taken into the air force from the reserve, the [Royal Australian] Air Force Reserve, and started my training. Which consisted of six months of radio theory and things of that nature and then another two months of radar theory, or, as it was called in those days, radio location. And then I went up into

New Guinea and I was up there for just on 19 or 20 months. From there I came back to Australia and travelled around the top end [northern part of Australia], around the Kimberley area [north-west Western Australia], which is still a favourite location in Australia for me. After the war I was very, very fortunate in being able to do a Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme [ran from March 1944 to July 1950], which is

designed to give [World War II male or female] veterans an education [vocational or academic]. And so once that was completed I started work as a professional engineer in a couple of small companies until, eventually, I went into the government ammunition factory, the Department of Defence production, and I was there for three or four years. And then, finally, I went to Dunlop [tyre company], where I

was the general development engineer and that was a job that I held for almost 25 years. I was retired at the age of 62 and I think that was my vocation really because retirement has been an incredible experience for me. It gave me more time to be with my rather extensive family.

We have six children of our own and from that we have then gone to the second generation and I have 19 grandchildren and then in the third generation we have two great grandchildren. So, all in all, apart from those early years which were most difficult for my mother raising two children during the Depression years, life has been good to me. And I’ve got a lovely

family around me and it’s just so beautiful.

My father and his brother migrated here in about 1918, it must be before that, 1915, from Greece.

And they chose to change their name from the Greek name of Raphtopoulis and anglicised it to Ralph. Somewhere along the line my father, George, he met my mother. My mother had been raised in Launceston in Tasmania and she was one of a family of eight. Back in

those days, of course, things were not so good in Tasmania from the point of view of jobs, so the family was split up and most of that family came to Melbourne and Adelaide. And it was in Melbourne that my mother met my father, George. And eventually they were married at St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1918.

I was born in 1921 when we were living not far from where I presently live and, indeed, I can see that house from my front window in this house. That’s where I spent my early years. Not long after this, at a time when I’d have been about four years of age, my mother and father split up and my mother was

left with two children at the beginning of the Depression. So at the time, of course, I had no realisation of how difficult it was for her, but she had to support two children on her own at a time when there was no provision whatsoever made for help to anybody who was unemployed or to single mothers or anything like that. So she had to work.

And in those early years, of course, I was not really conscious of what problems she might have had. But as I became older I started to realise. And, eventually, we were living in a house in Collingwood, a little tenement I suppose you might call it, part of a terrace. And my mother was working. She was working as a nursing aide in the Alfred

Hospital. Leaving home very early in the morning to go to work and leaving the two of us, at that time we’d have been perhaps seven or eight years of age, to get ourselves ready to go to school. Those times must have been very, very difficult for her because it’s the only time in my life that I have ever really been hungry because food was, there was always something to eat, but

very often we ate bread and dripping [fat exuded from meat in cooking], although my mother had that pride that I suppose you could attribute to the Irish and there was no way she would let us call it ‘dripping’, she used to call it bread and ‘ooly butter’ to ensure that we didn’t go to school and tell our playmates that we were eating bread and dripping. But, of course, in those days it’s very likely that all the other kids would have been eating ooly butter

also. So they were difficult times. During this time we had a message from Greece that my father had died and then my mother was able to consider getting married again and, indeed, she did. She married a fellow from Scotland, a bloke named Bill Mackay, who became my stepfather.

This helped a little, of course, in the family finances, so things were not so bad from then on. At that time I would have been perhaps 14 years of age, 15 perhaps, I’m not sure. In my education I was doing very well. In the primary school I got what was

called merit certificate and that would be equivalent perhaps to Year 8 in present day nomenclature. At Year 8 or merit certificate level I won a scholarship and I also was dux of the school, so I was doing all right.

That scholarship enabled me to go to a college where they were preparing young boys to go for a government scholarship to get you into secondary college. Unfortunately, during that time I became ill and wasn’t doing very well and subsequently I had to be taken to hospital where I was operated on for

appendicitis. So that messed up all my education at that level. But, of course, with realism it occurred to me at that age, I’d have been perhaps 11 or 12, that there was no way that I could contemplate going on to secondary college because of the difficult times that my mother was having, and so I had to reorganise my schooling. My scholarship was changed from that

college to a technical college, and this was after the appendectomy which I’d had and I was back to my normal self again. I did very well in the technical school. The maths, the geometry, all of those things were right down my alley. And it made me realise that I was really not an academic type of a

person but rather a more practical one. Soon after the age of 14, when I could legally go to work, I was apprenticed in the printing trade as a rotary printing machinist. That’s not a full apprenticeship, it was something that they called an indenture, and

that was rather limiting because it meant I could only work on rotary printing machines. So I endeavoured to expand that a little and I had my apprenticeship changed and I worked ultimately at a company in Melbourne which was doing the other types of printing, so called flat-bed printing, and that broadened my background quite a bit. And it was whilst I was at

this job that I decided to join the air force. I’ve often wondered what prompts you to make that decision because at that time I was 19 years of age and you’re not very mature in anything, let alone making decisions of that nature. In the early stages of the war I wasn’t much

concerned because it was a war in Europe and it didn’t really affect us here. But then when the Japanese became involved and they were coming down through the Asian islands in the south-west Pacific I started to realise that this was serious, that Australia was at risk, and I think that’s when I really made the decision that I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit back and do whatever I was doing and

so I made the move. I went into the recruiting centre and enlisted in the air force. They told me that they were not ready for me and I was put into the reserve. This meant that you wore a little badge on the side here, which I’ve long since lost, perhaps they even took it from me when I finally did enter the air force.

Back in those days there was a lot of fear of the Japanese, understandably so, and any young man who was not in uniform was subject to public criticism. I was stopped twice by women who wanted to know why I was getting around, “Why aren’t you in the air force or in the services?” This was very embarrassing and I’d point to my little

badge and say, “But I am”. And they would never believe me because they didn’t know what that badge was. As I said, at that time I still hadn’t reached the age of 20. So five days after I turned 20 I was called up into the air force and I went out to the [Royal] Melbourne Showgrounds where I did my so-called

‘rookies’ [recruit] training for two or three weeks or whatever it was. And then after that I was sent to the Melbourne Technical College [in 1960 it become the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT)].

Yes, at the time I suppose you are too young to know that you are poor because everybody else was in the same situation, in the areas in which I lived, anyhow, and at the schools to which I went. From my point of view

they were happy times. I’m talking about my very early times, pre-school perhaps. I was really not aware that we were in any way poor, as I said, or whatever because mostly everybody else was and nobody was better or worse off than what we were as far as I could

tell. Remembering I’m only four or five years of age at this time. But, eventually, you get to school, prep school was the beginning, of course, and I was starting to become aware, to become conscious of the fact that some kids would bring lunch, have lunch with them, and some wouldn’t. I used to wonder about that. It was a thing that used to make me wonder.

If ever a kid brought an apple to school the first other child to see that person or that kid with an apple would yell out “Bars the core”, and that was said to give that child a right to the core of the apple when the owner had finished with it. That’s a sad situation when you think about it and particularly so when the owner would

say, “There ain’t going to be no core” and he’d eat the whole bloody lot. With that level or that age level, I suppose, where you become conscious of that, then the Depression started to become more meaningful to someone like me anyhow. I was aware of it. And

on those occasions when we, my sister and I, were on what we’d call ‘short rations’ we often wondered what my mother ate, and remembering that she was working long hours to produce some sort of an income to maintain us, to put a roof over our heads and give us something to eat.

She was a nursing aide. She had no skills whatsoever other than that she was young. She was, at the time when I was born, she was 21, so she was a young woman and she was 25 or 26 in those early years and that of course was right in the depth of the Depression. So things must have been unbelievably

difficult for her. And she lived here with us for many years in her later life and I might add that she lived to be 18 days short of 100, which was a target that she had dearly wanted to get. She was a very, well, a dominant woman I suppose you’d have to say and there was no way

she was going to see her children taken over by the government and made wards of the state, which was the only alternative that a single mother had in those days to be able to support her children. If she couldn’t support them herself that was the only resource that she had to have them virtually taken over by the government and put in an orphanage. So, fortunately, due to the tenacity of my

mother I was spared that.

Yes, after they broke up I did meet him on occasions on a weekly basis. But even this stopped after a while because my mother said she had information to the effect that my father was trying to

take us, my sister and myself, to take us to Greece and live there. And perhaps it was something that my mother said or whatever, but I was terrified of this thought. I didn’t want to leave my mother. I didn’t want to leave Australia. And without being aware of it at the time, of course, I couldn’t speak Greek so I didn’t know how I was going to live there. I was terrified at the thought.

And the last image that I have of my father was when I was perhaps 12 years of age and he appeared outside the school that I was attending in those days. And the thought that passed into my mind was that he would want to grab me and cart me off to Greece, so I ran away. And he ran after me but he had no hope of catching me. And I remember looking

back and there he was some 100 or so metres behind me looking very distressed because he’d been trying to run and that’s the last time I ever saw my father. In recent years I’ve been so sad about that because he was a good man. I think he might have had difficulty in living with my mother because she was such a dominant,

capable woman. And I think any man would have had difficulty living with her. That’s the last time I ever saw him, but I can still remember what he looked like. I can still remember what he looked like when we had some of those regular weekly visits, which only took something like about half an hour or his time, or of time with him. So I do have a visual recollection of what he looked like but not

much more than that and since then I have no information. And later on it was presumed on some information that he had died. And that was when my mother was able to remarry because back in those days a divorce was very difficult to obtain, not as it was now, and it was necessary of course before you

could remarry.

That’s what I thought. Now whether that was true or not, I don’t know. I have no reason to believe that my mother was not truthful. She may have been exaggerating a little but no doubt the possibility was there that

he would want to take us back because it was probably not a very satisfactory situation for him. He had come out to Australia with his brother and I never ever saw his brother and never ever heard anything about him. So to all intents and purposes my father would have been here on his own with no family around him and nothing to support him in any way, particularly in

the raising of children. And I dare say if he did have any hopes of doing that sort of thing it would have had to have been in Greece, where I presume, and I don’t know, that he would have had some other family members, perhaps parents or other siblings or whatever, I don’t know.

I don’t really know, because at the time

when the family was complete I was up to say three, four or five years of age, perhaps, at the very oldest. And at that age you’re not aware of these things. But I believe that he was a chef, perhaps, I don’t know. Certainly he earned good money because in those early days we lived very comfortably, particularly for

those days. We had nice homes and I know where two of them are. Two of them are still not far from here. As I’ve said, one of them is a place that I can see from my present home. And in that home we had a billiard table and that would have been unheard of for most families in those days. So I think we would have been comfortable, which means that he must have been earning good money to come here as a

migrant and be able to do that sort of thing. But then, of course, I suspect he might have become ill because some of my earlier recollections, the visits that we had, the weekly visits, suggested to me, my mental images of him from that time in later years suggested to me that he might not have been well.

And that perhaps was proven in later years, not many years later when it was said that he had died. But in those weekly visits we used to go to the Victoria Market where he was working, on a Saturday morning in any case, on a food stall there helping, I presume, another Greek, he was helping him a little bit.

And, of course, if he was not working in those days because of his health then he wasn’t able to pay his weekly maintenance in support of his children. And I’m well aware that that wasn’t paid because I have recollections of when my mother used to take us to the clerk of courts at the Flemington Courthouse where the

money was supposed to be paid, and they would say, “It hasn’t been paid in”. So I still have a remembrance of the sense of desperation that I felt was in my mother when she got that information from the clerk of courts at the courthouse. So my father, I know very little about

and it’s sad I think. I’m sad for him because, as I said, I have no reason to believe that he was anything but a good man.

In that area, Kensington and Newmarket. We spent many years in Kensington. As far as I was

concerned, at that stage I was about four years of age, I found them happy times. And this is pre-school, playing with some of the other kids. And, of course, Kensington is not too far from here and I have on two occasions gone back on a nostalgic visit to the area, to see what’s happening there. Unfortunately, the little

house in which we lived has long since been demolished and a health centre, health clinic, has been built in that location. But I have happy memories of playing with the kids. Next door to us was a dear old lady called Mrs Turner. And we kids gave that poor old lady a hell of a time with what was called ‘knick knock’, where

you crept up to the front door and knocked on her door and then you whizzed off and hid. I suppose it is a very common childish game. One of the places in which we used to hide was a little space that was between her front veranda, the verandas being right on the footpath, and the next door house, a little space in which two kids could hide. And that’s where some of us used to hide. And one day perhaps we’d

gone beyond what she was capable of coping with and she came out with a bucket of water and I will never forget when she tipped that bucket of water over us. ‘Knick knock’ was not a popular game from then on, but one can’t blame poor old Mrs Turner for that. Kensington, of course, is not far from the

Newmarket saleyards. And there was another occasion when I wandered down there and the sheep were there. And there was a little lamb that had been dropped by its mother and its mother had been moved on and it was all on its own, so I picked up this little lamb and carted it about one kilometre home. And when my poor old mother, she was horrified at the thought of an extra mouth to feed and

this little creature bleating away. She told me I had to take it back so that I had to do. And I took the little lamb back, but of course by that time there were no other sheep there anyhow and I had to leave the poor little thing and I was very upset about that. From a kid’s point of view, yes, they were happy times. And then, of course, I started school.

The Catholic school was just up the road in the same street in which my house was and I started there and I had a happy time there. I still have vivid memories of a young nun, and looking back on it now from my visual recollection she was a very young person, probably no more than 18, and she was in charge of all the little kids who had just started school. And she was

such a lovely person. Years later, not many years later, when I made my confirmation I chose her name, so I had another name added to my already three names. So I’m Leonard John Michael, and added on her name, Tarsacous Ralph. Yes, so that was what I can remember of my early days

as a kid growing up in the Depression.

I had a sister.

She was 14 or 15 months younger than me, and it was a strange relationship. We used to fight. And I see this in many families, arguments between the siblings, but we loved each other. And I think this was

exemplified by an occasion in later years, when I would have been 12 years of age, I got into a little bit of a fight with one of the other kids of my age. Nothing serious, it was just a bit of pushing and shoving. And my sister, Margaret, saw this and she went over the road and she grabbed this poor little fellow, Ray Barker his name was, I’ve never forgotten that, and she tore into him. And, of course, girls don’t fight the same way as boys do.

Boys just at that age anyhow, we just pushed and shoved each other, but girls tend to pull hair and scratch with their nails and she made such a mess of this poor little fellow that I’ve never forgotten that. So there was that love and affection between us, and certainly in later years my sister had a kidney problem and, indeed, she had a kidney transplant, and

she’d had an unhappy marriage and she lived with me for quite a number of years before she eventually died. And that was quite a few years ago. So my sister and I we fought to establish the…

There’s a story there. I never ever saw myself as a Greek. And apart from when I was a baby, some of my

early baby photos show me as being someone who could have been Mediterranean, but as I grew I didn’t look Greek and I didn’t have a Greek name, I had an English name. At one of the schools I was at, and this was at a time when I was about 10 years of age, I was appalled at the way the Australian kids used to

treat a fellow student who was, I suspect he was Italian and he had a name that I’m not sure was Italian, it might have been Spanish, I’m told it might have been Spanish, a name that sounded to me like Sensarula, Tony Sensarula, he was red-head and the Australian kids used to give him a dreadful time, they used to call him a “dirty bloody

dago [racist epithet for Italian]” and things like that. But Tony could fight and the Australian kids were not bright enough to realise that when they abused Tony, Tony would really get the best of them in a brawl [fight]. Me, I was never a fighter, I suppose you might called me a wimp, and said “Well, I’m not going to tell anybody”. I used to keep this to myself and I have no doubt that nobody every realised that I

had a Greek background. And I wasn’t going to tell them. Until, eventually, when I was married and I had my own children and they started to approach teenage years, they wanted to know about my father and I realised they had a right to know. So I had to face up to my problem, my Greek background, and tell them. But in the event it turned out there was no problem at all, because by this time the

racism that was very, very evident in Australia and has been, I think, right through the early part of Australian history, the Chinese got it early and then the Greeks and the Italians, and by the time that I’m talking of when my children approached teenage, by that time I would have been about 35 years of age so that would have

been about 1950-odd, that racism that was still there had been shifted from the Greeks and the Italians, who were becoming accepted, to the newer arrivals, the Vietnamese, they were getting the racism that had previously been directed at the people from other countries. So at the time when I decided to come out of hiding, if I might put it that way,

nobody was the least bit interested.

I tell you what it was, remembering what those kids used to do to the poor little red-headed boy, I was too shrewd to get into that, because I was always a good runner but never a good fighter. So they were

difficult for kids from other countries, yes, but not for me.

Well, at the age when my children became, say, 14 years of age, and I was married at 28, 29, so that, whatever the mathematics are, work it out for yourself.

In the 1950s, I’m guessing, obviously a long time after the war. Well, it would have to be a long time after the war because I

wasn’t married yet, maybe in 1960. At that time the Greeks, Italians and even the Chinese were well-respected within the community. And today, of course, I think, happily, racism doesn’t really exist, except in some of the old die-hard yobbo Australians you might find it. But generally speaking I’m not aware of it at all

and certainly not in my home there’s not a sign of it. We have people from all countries here and they’re all welcome and they’re lovely people.

She was blonde and there’s no way anybody was going to talk of her as being Greek, so she had it easier than I did.

I had it easy too because, as I said, I didn’t really look Greek and I don’t know that I do now even. I don’t think she was ever aware of any Greek background in our family and, of course, my father wasn’t about so nobody would have known, nobody.

No it was bars, b-a-r-s, I bar the core. I bar the core was the expression. And it was applied to many other things. I bar first go in a game or something of that nature.

Bar first go or bar the apple core. That was the way in which it was used.

It’s probably a variation of the same thing. Did you have “Bags the core”?

No. None at all.

Yes, very much so. I am a Catholic. I was baptised and went right through the Catholic process and I am still a practising Catholic. My wife and I are what you would call good Catholics and we

try to live up to those principles. So when I first went to school, remember I mentioned that there was a nun who was in charge of the preps or whatever they called them, they didn’t call them ‘preps’ in those days, she was such a delightful person and so very, very young, as I realise now. I had the great pleasure of meeting her

again some three or four years ago and she had given her whole life to God and she was in retirement in Shepparton, near where one of my four daughters lives with her family. I think I’ve got to say that my religion has been an important part of my life

and, indeed, it was during the war too, because I have many recollections of the religious aspects of war or how very dependant you are on religion when you are in places where, dangerous places, shall I say. And I have a strong recollection of a time in Bulolo [280km north of Port Moresby, New Guinea], where we were so very, very

close to the Japanese, and a priest, and his name was Father [John A] Morgan, he’s still alive and he’s Bishop Morgan now in Canberra [Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn], and he was saying Mass for us and the air raid sirens went. Being a radar man I knew that in that locality that we were, where we had such a short range in which the radar could operate

because of the mountains, that you had something like three or four minutes maximum before the bombs would start to fall. So you were tuned so that as soon as you heard an air raid you were off. You didn’t wait a second. So here we are in the critical part of the Mass and the air raid sirens go and I’m ready to go and Father Morgan just kept on saying the

Mass so we kept on kneeling there listening, very, very worrying, but in the event no bombs dropped. Everybody needed religion in wartime, I believe, and there were many occasions, many, many occasions, where there would be some sort of a service on. It didn’t matter what it was whether it was a Catholic, an Anglican, or

whatever, you went along because you needed it. And I’m not talking about the Catholics. I’m talking about people who probably had no religion, professed no religion whatsoever. How can you be otherwise when you’re in a situation where you might be dead the next day? Maybe a lot of the fellows were having two

bob each way and you can’t argue with that because, I suppose, when you get down to the nitty gritty then that’s what it is about. You would see people at Mass and you just knew they were not Catholic, but they were always welcome.

My mother was, of course, but my father, I do not know. I know so little about my father.

I have no reason to believe that he had any sort of religion whatsoever. I have no indication. I don’t know that he didn’t have either, but my mother was always a dedicated Christian, there’s no doubt.

In the areas in which I lived?

No,

we lived in what I suppose was a fair sample of the general community. You had all sort of people with different beliefs. Some with none. Just as it is today, I dare say, although in those days religion was a little more meaningful to a lot of people, more so than it is today. Perhaps I’ve said that the wrong way around. Perhaps I should have said that

people in those days were more committed to a religion of whatever sort than they would be today.

My very earliest time, of course, was in Kensington, which is a suburb of Melbourne, perhaps four or five kilometres from the centre of Melbourne.

Today it is quite a trendy area, but it wasn’t in those days because there were very few people who were not affected by the Depression. Even somebody whose father, some family where the father had a job, they would have been affected because he didn’t know how long his job would last perhaps and all sorts of things like that. But then so many of

them didn’t have a wage earner in the family. How they managed, I’m damned if I know because there was no social security, none of those things. There was a thing called ‘sustenance’ and this meant that if the father was prepared to go out

miles and miles away and work in these working camps constructing roads and things like this, then the government would weekly or fortnightly put a load of groceries on the doorstep and a load of firewood on the footpath in front of the house, and that was it. But if you didn’t have a man in the house who could go and work, you didn’t

get it. So as I say, my mother was in that situation so she was not really eligible for any sort of support from the government, other than having her children taken away.

Yes, my mother’s mother, my grandmother, she, of course, was not a young

woman at that stage in her life. She had raised eight children and my mother was the sixth, I think it was. She was working, they had moved from Launceston where the family had originated to Victoria and she worked as a chef, a cook I supposed you’d call it, in hotels around the Wimmera area of [north-western] Victoria. And she used to send us money

occasionally from whatever she could afford. And she was a blessing to us. More than that she used to write and as I grew older and was able to read she used to write telling me stories about the wheat carts going past the hotel where she was working up in Mathoura [northern Victoria] and Young [southern New South Wales], Rupanyup [western Victoria] and places like that. And I found those

fascinating stories. But she was a great help. Then for a short time one of my mother’s younger brothers, in the family of eight six of them were boys and she was one of two girls, one of the younger brothers came and lived with us for a short time, but only a short time. And I don’t know what happened after that because at that stage I’m only

four or five years of age and you can only guess what happened. And that uncle, his name was Len also, Len Giblin, that was my mother’s family name. Two Lens in the house, it doesn’t work and so my name had to be changed. And I am aware now of the resentment that I had,

that my name had to be changed because my Uncle Len lived with us. And he had two names. They often used to call him ‘Reg’, why I don’t know, I don’t think it was one of his given names. And I used to be very sour on that, the fact that my name had to be changed. I was called ‘Billy’ and for many, many years people called me Billy, and I have a friend from

teenage days who still tends to call me Billy but he’s the only one now. Even my mother stopped calling me Billy many years ago. So he would have been, that is my Uncle Len, he would have been some sort of financial help to my mother, but that’s as far as it goes as far as I can remember. I don’t know of anything else.

No I don’t, but you’ve got to remember that in the times at Kensington particularly,

and that’s my early childhood, I don’t know that I would ever have been aware if there were such a thing. Later on at a time when we were living in Collingwood, when I was perhaps 10, I have a recollection that I was a bit interested in joining the Scouts [male youth organisation]. But the Scouts were run by

a Protestant, maybe Anglican or something like that, in this particular group and I wasn’t allowed to go, which I didn’t appreciate.

I don’t know. I don’t recall exactly what she said. I don’t know. You’ve got to remember that I’m

10 or 11 years of age, and that’s many, many years ago being 82, I’m more than 82 now, I’m nearly 83, it’s a long way to remember. But, yes, there was that difficulty. In those days, of course, I couldn’t go into a non-Catholic church, which was in conflict with what I said about the church services in the

war zones, when it didn’t matter a bugger what the religion was. If it was a church service you wanted to be there because you had to get close to God in one way or another when the Japs were just around the corner sort of thing. But, no, as a child I have no recollection of religious conflict. No doubt it was there but I was not aware of it.

But racism was…and maybe I can tell you a little story about that. One of the kids who was at the school, this is when I first started school, the first year perhaps, it was a little boy that I became really pally with and his name was Andy Barrett, I remember that well, Andy invited me home after school and, of course, you’ve got to remember

that my mother was working so when I came home from school I came home to an empty house. So, yes, I would go with Andy Barrett and he took me down to his home which was, and remembering how young I am, I was still somewhat appalled at the poorness of his home, but it wasn’t significant and they made me welcome. And I came home and I told Mum about it and Mum said that was very nice. But

sometime later she met Andy Barrett and then she told me that I was never to go to Andy Barrett’s place again. And I did not know why. I could not understand. And subsequently I learned that Andy Barrett was Aboriginal, but at the time I was not aware of things like that. He looked like just another little boy to me. So racism was there even in my own mother.

Poor Andy Barrett.

He was the only one I can remember, just Andy Barrett. I have no recollection of any others, certainly not at my school. No doubt they were around the neighbourhood, that’s very likely, but I don’t know. Let’s not forget that I’m a little boy and I only knew what I really came in contact with, I suppose.

It’s very difficult because people have their pride and nobody would ever tell you how bad their life was nor indeed how good it was. I suppose we all tried to make the best of the situation in which we were placed and you didn’t know. I had no realisation that we were poor.

Nobody else was poor, I suppose, from my point of view. No doubt they all had their difficulties. No doubt they all had their times when they didn’t get as much food as they’d like to have. I have no doubt of that, but in those days I was not aware of it. But on occasions when you travelled around, whatever way, and I’m thinking about my earlier

teenage [years], I suppose, when I had a little old pushbike and got around a bit on that, and riding around past some of these better homes I used to wonder about that, but it didn’t worry me. I had a home, I had a mother who

loved me and I got a bit of food, and I had a sister to fight with, what more could a boy want? But at the early teenage, perhaps you started to become appreciative of what your lot was. For instance, education, I can remember riding my bicycle past the Melbourne University and thinking to myself, “I wonder what goes

on in there? But that’s not for the likes of me, that’s only for rich people.” Which, I suppose, was true at the time, because in those days you had to have money to go to university. That was the way I used to feel about it, not even realising that the time would come after the war when I would be able to study there. Thanks to the war, I might add, because had it not been for the war I would never ever have had that

opportunity. I would have remained a printer all my life. So I’ve got to be grateful to the war, and that’s a horrible thing to say, I dare say, but nevertheless it’s the Australian Government, I suppose, was making the best of a bad job and did give us that opportunity. And many thousands of ex-servicemen took advantage of that Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme and were able

to lift themselves up from that lower level of life to a much better one. It’s been a godsend to me.

Of course. You could not avoid it. As I’ve often thought, you had to be a good fighter or a good runner. And as kids, of course, you didn’t come in contact with the big fellows. The one that comes to mind was Red Maloney, he was a pretty notorious,

what you would call, ‘gangster’, I suppose, and he was well known of and I think I saw him once outside a hotel in Fitzroy but I’m not sure about that. At the time I would have been only a young teenager. But, of course, the gangsterism wasn’t limited to the adults; there were kids who got around.

And I have a recollection of coming home from school one day and being accosted by two kids for whatever reason I don’t know but, as I said, I’ve never been a fighter, they chased me along Hoddle Street. Hoddle Street in those days was not the big wide street that it is today. But, anyhow, they chased me along this street and I came to this corner and I

whipped around this corner but as I did, so I looked back and I saw that one of these kids was a long way in front of the other one, so I whipped around the corner and I came back and I thought, “I’ll have you”. And as he came around the corner I hit him. And the poor little fellow, he was only about my age, he sort of staggered backwards and collapsed into the gutter. And his nose, I was horrified; I thought I’d killed him. I was terrified, “I’ve

killed him”. I ran away so I don’t know whatever happened to him. By this time, of course, the second one’s come along and we’re both standing there looking at this poor little fellow in the gutter. Yes, that was on all the time that sort of thing, but you got to know how to look after yourself and, as I said, I was a good runner. I had always done very well in the sports in

running so you’ve got to use your best assets don’t you. If you can’t fight you’ve got to be a good runner.

No, no. One time perhaps I witnessed a thing where the police had arrived at a hotel in Collingwood and

there was some sort of a fight going on between two fellows and the police grabbed one of them and he started to wrestle with the police. And the policemen had handcuffs which he then set to hit the fellow across the face, and I was a bit horrified with that. Most of the kids fighting was not serious in the sense that,

‘push and shove’ was what we called it, you just wrestled and didn’t really hurt anybody at all, and to see that, I don’t know, maybe the policeman was quite justified in doing what he had done but in my youthfulness it was horrible. But in a way I didn’t see much of it really.

As a weapon?

No. No. I saw little sign of anything. I think Collingwood had a reputation that was far exaggerated, and Fitzroy too, Fitzroy and Collingwood. There was a bit of antagonism perhaps between the Fitzroy kids and the Collingwood kids but it was harmless.

You’d have a bit of a fight but nobody ever got hurt and everybody went away reckoning that they’d won and nobody suffered any serious injury. The use of weapons like pickets off fences, I was never aware of that. No doubt it happened, it probably did, I don’t know, I wasn’t aware of it.

The Fitzroy?

No, I never ever heard of that.

No, I don’t know.

Yes. I

think so, and I have studied John Wren [an Melbourne businessman and reputedly underworld figure] in later years, Power without Glory [novel by Frank Hardy in which the central character, John West, was apparently based on Wren], I’ve read that several times and found it fascinating. Somehow I knew that he was a great benefactor of the Catholic Church and I don’t know how I would have known that. And, of course, Archbishop [Daniel] Mannix [a controversial and outspoken figure, Doctor Mannix was archbishop of Melbourne from 1917 to 1963]

had a connection with John Wren. And I can recall Doctor Mannix every afternoon he used to walk from the cathedral down Victoria Parade and down Victoria Street, which was not far from where I lived, and I have seen him many times walking down there. This stately old gentleman with his unusual sort of clothing being approached by

beggars, perhaps you’d call them, and handing out two shillings here and there. It probably came from John Wren but, no, I didn’t really know of him. I was well aware of the activities that John Wren would have been employing in the SP bookmakers [Starting Price, illegal bookmakers]. That was, I believe, where John Wren got a lot of his income from.

On a Saturday afternoon you couldn’t walk past a hotel without seeing the gangs of, not gangs, groups of men coming and going and placing their bets. And the fellow, of course, who was positioned in a strategic spot was the so-called ‘cockatoo’, the look-out, to warn of the police coming.

But then, of course, when you read the book it becomes apparent that hardly any of these fellows were necessary because the police appear to have been paid off so John Wren or his, shall we say, his ‘site managers’ were well aware when the police were coming. But, no, I was not aware of that at all. The groups, yes, I knew about that, but I would not have known about John Wren.

Yes, of course. As I said, my mother had six brothers and she always said that six of them had been overseas.

I’m questioning that now because I’m doing a little bit of research for a history that I’m writing, my family history, and I cannot find a record that my mother’s youngest brother ever was in the AIF [Australian Imperial Forces], but certainly the older five were and this was something of which my mother was very proud and, I suppose, I was too.

I had occasion to meet some of those older fellows. The oldest one had died of war injuries and several of them had been affected by gas in France. And one of them, the third or perhaps fourth brother, he lived at Pascoe Vale, a suburb of Melbourne, and I used to spend some time out there and

at that time he was bedridden, so that was the only contact that I ever had with people from the First World War, my uncles. They were well represented. Some of the older brothers had been in the Gallipoli campaign and all of them had survived that and then

the others had been in France, but just where I don’t know. I’m hoping to get further information on that because I’m trying to get their documents. You can get that these days, as the National Archives [of Australia] are tending to digitalise that so I have requested that that be done for the five brothers. That will not be available on that Web site until about

March [2005]. So I’m looking forward to that. It was well spoken of in my family and through my mother my family was very much a World War I family, very much so.

No, never. It’s strange, maybe there was an ethos perhaps, and I see it amongst many of my Second World War mates that you don’t talk about it. I don’t think I was ever

that way. I was always prepared to talk about my war experiences, but then again unless somebody asks you, you think they’re not interested. And perhaps that would be true in my own family. It wasn’t until my own children reached adulthood that they started to ask questions and I was very, very ready to talk to them about it. And

I have written my experiences really for their benefit, not solely of course, because it’s an important thing to record your war histories and I feel very strongly about that. In the early days, in my early days, no, I only heard a little bit that my mother had told

me, which was precious little, and that is that some of my older uncles had been in the Gallipoli landing and that then they had all been in France and that some of them were gassed, more than that I do not know. I know nothing at all about their wartime experience.

Not that I can recall. If any it would have been precious little. No, I think I’d have to answer your question by saying “No”. It’s not until later years that I have read [about] Gallipoli and I have several books, one I’ve finished just recently. I got one for Christmas, I think. One of my children gave me a book on Gallipoli. I’ve got two books with the same name, different authors,

Gallipoli, and it’s a fascinating story of bungling and bravery, hopelessness and stupidity. Stupidity and bungling at the higher levels and bravery at the lower levels, no doubt.

Precious little. Not much. I suppose it wasn’t taught

perhaps or maybe I wasn’t interested. History and geography is something that I’ve only appreciated in recent years, when we’ve been able to travel. We’ve done a lot of travelling overseas and that stimulates your interest. So I’ve done a lot of reading to try and catch up but I’ve got to say that when I went to

war I knew little about geography anywhere in the world. Australia was the centre of the universe and I have only in recent years admitted this to anybody and I’ll say it now that I used to think that maybe these other countries just don’t exist. And I have a vivid recollection of the first time I flew into America, coming into Los Angeles,

and looking down from the plane and saying “Well, it really is there”. Because there was that thought in my mind that Australia was the centre of the universe and there was nothing else because back in those days, those early days of my life, getting anywhere, of course, was so difficult. You couldn’t just hop on a plane and be overseas in 20 or 30 hours, it was more like 20 or

30 weeks to get from Australia to wherever. And I was not really aware that the early Australian population had come from England on the wrong side of the mast. I was not aware of that at all. Of course, I suppose it was the level of education that I was getting that those sorts of things were

not, I don’t know, maybe I’m not right there but I don’t have any recollections of very much.

Yes, I did what was done. I did what I was told, I suppose. I had no reason to be, I’m not a royalist and I’m

not an anti-royalist. I sang God Save the Queen and I would not want us to become other than a monarchy. I’d prefer that we stay as we were, but I wouldn’t be concerned if we became a republic. But don’t let them change the bloody flag because I fought for that

flag and some of these donkeys that you see about today that want to change it to God-only-knows what for no reason whatsoever that I can see. Change the constitution if you like and make us a republic, but don’t change the flag.

They’re entitled to their view, but Australia was the centre of the universe let there be no mistake in my

mind, anyhow.

Probably not, and I think it gets back to certainly my age and I had very little secondary education. None at all, none at all. I got to the equivalent of Year 8 and do they teach kids even today

much about the history of Australia or even less so, I imagine, the history of England. I don’t think so. Perhaps you learn that in secondary school but, of course, I had no secondary education whatsoever until after the war and then, of course, it was more directed to technology. So any knowledge that I have about

the world outside Australia and, indeed, Australian history is what I have learned since, and I find it fascinating. I dare say I would have loved to have had that knowledge, that learning, as a teenager, but my education was sadly neglected in those days.

I suppose as a teenager

you’re not much fussed about these sorts of things, until they get close to home. When war broke out in Europe, of course, there were many young Australians who rushed off and had to be there. And I feel they were the adventurers. They went there to be in it because it was there and it was going to be fun. And I think a lot of people had that idea it was fun.

I was not much interested in what was happening in Europe. You would get all the propaganda perhaps about the war, about Hitler and how bad he was and what he was doing, and you believed it but didn’t want to be involved. But when the

Japanese became involved and this would have been in the early ’40s perhaps when they first started and they were coming south. Now it’s a different story because it was obvious to everybody and to me, as a young teenager, that they’re not interested in taking Papua New Guinea [PNG] or

Indonesia or some country like that, they are after Australia and now this is serious. Then you had the propaganda here too to encourage people to enlist. There were the big posters that you saw of this horrible looking person who was supposed to be a Japanese and he was coming down here and he was going to rape all your women and take over

your country. This sort of thing and so now you are involved.

Billboards and things like this, the same as you would find advertising now on these big billboards, that’s where it was.

As far as I can recall,

yes. Certainly this was the thing which really decided me that I had to do my job.

I suppose, well, look, I’ve got to say

this that somewhere along the line I was surprised that the average Japanese does not fit that image that I had. None of them. I never ever saw a Japanese that approached anything like what I’d seen in these propaganda posters.

Well, a horrible looking fellow, enormous because they’d fill the whole poster

and I can’t remember but the inference was there. Chasing women perhaps, I’m not sure of that but that sort of thing and it wasn’t difficult to see your own mother, sister in that situation, but a grotesque looking face, an enormous big fat creature. And the average Japanese never was and

isn’t anything like that. And we have had many Japanese in my home and they are delightful people and some of them are very, very good looking. We had an elegant looking Japanese boy here, a real heart-throb, I would say, amongst the girls. But it was all biased in that direction to move you, to get you to join up, because in

those days it was voluntarily. Eventually, it became compulsory or you could be conscripted into the army but at the time I joined it was still voluntary, but it was motivated by this fear of the Japanese and, of course, the fear extended to everybody. And the women would verbally abuse you

in the street if you were not in uniform regardless or anything else so, yes, there was a lot of fear. And looking back on it now I think it was necessary that we had that fear because Australia really was under threat. The Japanese had advanced

down through the islands of the south-west Pacific and never had any sort of a set back. Singapore, which was supposed to be the bastion of the English defence system, was taken in a couple of days. And once Singapore had gone there was not a thing to stop them and at that stage the Americans,

well, the Americans were involved at that stage because they had the Japanese, I think they made a very stupid move to attack America as they did at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, because immediately they [the Americans] were involved. And thank god they were because Australia could never have stopped them, although on the Kokoda Trail [New Guinea] it was mainly the Australians

who stopped the Japanese and drove them back. Then, of course, they went further north up to Salamaua [60km east of Bulolo] and were going to come back through Lae [75km, north-west of Bulolo] and Bulolo and that’s where I was so, yes, there was a lot of fear.

I don’t know much about that. I suppose I didn’t get much opportunity to see it because

the only way you could see it was to go to the picture shows and that cost money, which in those early days I had very little of. So I suppose I didn’t see too many films in the theatre and hence I wouldn’t have seen much of the newsreels.

There were newsreels and you can bet your

life that they were doctored or exaggerated, not untruthfully I don’t imagine, but doctored or presented in a way which would make people realise that they had to get to and do something. Not just in the armed forces but even in production of ammunition and clothing and things of that nature, food even, because all of those things are a very essential

part of warfare. I, as I said, the German–English conflict meant little to me. I knew it was going on and you could see it in the newspapers perhaps, and I think we did have newspapers in my home, I’m not sure. It was there but it didn’t mean much, but once the Japanese got

involved that was an entirely different story.

Yes, I can remember hearing it on the wireless [radio], as we called it in those days. The English prime minister, I suppose, it would have been Churchill at that time, saying

that England is now at war with Germany. And, of course, when England is at war at that time so were we.

I can remember hearing it on the radio

and wondering what it meant for me, I suppose. And at that time I suppose I was moved by that news but I didn’t really see that it affected me a great deal. It was not until people I knew started to enlist

but, as I say, it wasn’t until such time as the Japanese got involved that I really felt that I had to do something.

I think so. I think I’d have to say that, yes.

You would hear it on the

radio, of course, the radio news and in the newspapers but I don’t have a recollection. It was a gradual process, I suppose, and certainly after that declaration of war there was a time of inactivity where nothing happened and it was almost as though it was a dream

that war has been declared on Germany, nothing to really drive you. And for months nothing happened and then it slowly started to take affect and things started to happen and you started to learn about people who were volunteering to go and men who were putting their age up to 18, I suppose, was the minimum age.

It didn’t affect me a great deal, I’ve got to say.

My mates? I don’t know. Here again I don’t know, in my age group there was probably little discussion about it. Things went on as they had done before the war, I think. Certainly in my case they did.

It was someone else’s problem. I think I’d be very much aware of that, that it wasn’t my problem. It’s hard to say. It’s a slow gradual process and you can’t really say what day did it happen? One different day,

of course, was when the British prime minister announced that the British Commonwealth was at war. That was a definite date, whatever it was, and I can’t remember, but other than that it was a slow and, I might emphasise, a very slow process in the first few months. Nothing happened, not that I was aware of and that might be, again, might be my ignorance.

That’s been asked of me by my family. Of course, my mother’s brothers were all AIF and here am I not joining the AIF but the air force. Why? I don’t know. At that time I suppose I

wasn’t much fussed about what I did in the air force. I don’t think I was going to be a ‘fly boy’ . I had no aspirations in that direction. When I joined the air force I just wanted to join the air force. And I could have finished up a cook or a mess man or whatever, because I had no qualifications to get me into anything else. None at all. So

somebody must have been looking after me because it was probably only the fact that I had built little crystal radio sets in my earlier life that the recruiting officers probably said “Ah ha” and put my name down. Because subsequent to the war, I learned that England had provided Australia with the wherewithal

or the secrets of radio location, as it was called, subsequently called radar. And they were preparing to train people so anybody that came in with suitable qualifications like prior experience or, in my case, an interest in crystal sets, then you were put into that list and deferred. That’s probably why I went into the air force reserve for three months until they got their training scheme organised,

and then they started to bring all these people in. That’s how I think it happened. But I had no idea of what I wanted to be in the air force and why the air force, I don’t know. I dare say I could have been quite happy in the army or the navy. Well, I don’t know about the navy because

I knew I had a tendency to seasickness so I suppose the navy was excluded for that. And yet, in later years my sport became sailing and I became a very good sailor in small dinghies.

I think there was an element of that, yes. I don’t know because at the time that didn’t influence me at all so maybe that thinking was not there. In those days I was interested in girls but terrified by

them and I wouldn’t have been choosing a uniform that would have been attractive to girls. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it was the technological side, because whilst I had no reason at that time to know that I had that bent towards technology it took the air force and the radar to bring that out. And when you make your decision you have no idea of

this and, as I said, I could well have been a cook or a dish-washer or a waiter in the officers mess or something of that nature, for all I knew about it.

Yes, yes, yes, my word.

No, before’42,

early ’41. As far as my memory goes it was December ’41 when they attacked Pearl Harbor.

And they had been advancing down through the south-west Pacific islands long before that.

Early ’41 I would think, perhaps late ’40.

No, prior to actually going along to the recruiting centre and being inducted into the air force

reserve, I was subject to no pressure whatsoever. It was very much a personal decision based on the fear of the Japanese, who were quite obviously advancing southwards towards Australia. I think that was the motivating force behind my decision. I was not subjected to any pressure in the streets

from women, who would accost you if you were not in uniform until after I had become a member of the air force reserve. And that was a period of three months from the time that I first enlisted to the time that I was actually taken in to the air force. Prior to that I was wearing civilian clothes with a little badge.

Yes, but I suppose you’ve got to say that the Japanese were getting closer. Before I joined the air force they were so far away and then in the next month or so they had advanced enormously and were getting closer and closer. So everybody was starting to get more worried and I think that probably was the reason.

In those days I don’t think there was a place in the air force for women, as there was subsequently, and you could imagine the fear that women would have had. They didn’t want to be chased by Japanese and raped by them, which is what the publicity was telling us. They were reading it the same way as I was. I can understand

how a lot of women would be wanting to know why some apparently healthy young male was not doing his bit to defend them maybe.

Twice.

It’s hard to remember,

except that they would stop you in the street and want to know why you were not in uniform.

Yes, just out of the blue. Someone would be walking towards you and they would stop you. This, of course, ignored the fact that there were many young men who were in special jobs, special industry, whatever they called that, I can’t recall.

Essential services, I suppose, would be the word, in factories making munitions and things like that.

Protected industries, yes. So they couldn’t join the air force, but these women made no exceptions on that and I was not much aware of those sorts of exemptions, shall I say. But I would show them my little badge and

it didn’t mean a thing to them.

It was a thing about perhaps 30 millimetres across and, I think, it was something like a, I don’t know I can’t remember, but it was a very insignificant little bronze badge, very difficult to see. I believe that the air force took that back from me on the occasion three months

later when I was actually taken into the air force and given a uniform. You didn’t need your little badge then. But these women obviously didn’t recognise the badge or didn’t even see it, perhaps because, I don’t think that was any excuse. The fact that you could say, “But I have joined!”, “Yeah, but you’re not in uniform”. “I’ve got a little badge.” “What the hell, a little badge is not going to help me,” they would say. And with some

justification. There was a lot of fear, a lot of fear amongst the women, there’s no doubt about that.

I never ever did and I never ever heard of anybody, but I never knew anybody who did. I’m not sure whether any of my air force friends ever received a white feather, possibly they

did. I didn’t and I don’t know anybody who did, but undoubtedly it happened because the fear was intense. There’s no argument, there’s no doubt about it. In the latter stages, before I joined, I don’t think there was because the Japanese were a long way away, but in the three months that I was in the reserve a lot had happened. The Japanese were becoming

invincible or everybody thought they were. So they were bad times and I don’t have any ill will towards those women who stopped me. No doubt they made a practice of it doing it to many other people, many other young men in civilian clothes. I don’t think anyone was unhappy with them.

They were frightened.

I was only three months in [the] reserves. I enlisted in June 1941 and put into the reserve and then in

August, the 18th, it was five days after my 20th birthday, that I was taken in to the air force from the reserve, so only three months from June to August in the reserve.

Yes, in the reserve. My education was woefully deficient and

whilst I had that qualification that they were seeking, which was an interest in radio, and I had done well in the simple maths that they set, probably that test might have highlighted some of my deficiencies because they said that I would have to, and you’re in the air force now, you’re in the reserve but you have got to go to maths

lessons in the evening after you’d finished your day’s work. And they were in what was the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association] building, which has disappeared now, near the city. And I used to go there twice a week in the evening for a couple of hours and study mathematics at the levels that I had never ever learned before. That was good. I enjoyed that and

I’m achieving something that was an obvious deficiency in my education, as I became more aware later on in any case. Yes, I had to do that but no more than that.

No, just the maths. Higher maths was my deficiency. I had never done any of the higher maths but what I had done I was very good at.

So thank God they made that choice for me, because if my maths had not been good maybe my interest in radio sets, crystal sets, might not have been enough.

Out to the

showgrounds and you were given various parts of your uniform, the overalls, these horrible blue overalls which are far too big and far too long in the legs. And for some reason they used to put a red mark, a paint mark, on the side which indicated that you were a trainee or something. And then you would march round and round the arena in the showgrounds,

round and round and round learning various stages of drill. And then you would have to get your injections, medical tests and things like that. The injections were interesting, too. By that time I had taken up racing on push bikes. I had been working from the age of 14, so

four years, until I was 18, 19, when I joined the air force. And I had been able to buy myself a nice racing bike and I was racing on that bike before the war. So I was very, very fit when I went in to the air force. It so happened that in the same rookie group was a fellow name [Leonard William] ‘Len’ Sprague, the two Lens, Len Ralph and Len

Sprague. Len Sprague had won a Stawell Gift [in 1939; famous Australian sprinting race held in Stawell, Victoria], a runner, a big tall fellow and he was as fit as can be. In our group the only two fellows who collapsed after injections were guess who? The two Lens, the two fittest blokes in the group. What that meant I don’t know, but that was interesting. The

course, the rookies course at the showgrounds, was fascinating, all rough and tough. The corporal in charge of the group, we wondered about these people but then there would come a time when there was a moment of relaxation and they would join us and we’d start to realise that they’re just ordinary blokes the same as us. They’ve got a job to do and they’re doing it fairly

well. So we marched around and around and around and we learned all sorts of things. We went out to the range. There was a rifle range out at Williamstown [south-western Melbourne suburb] and we shot at the targets that they used to have there. It was a full professional competition range for other than military purposes. It had been taken over for that, of course,

during the war. We went there, we fired not too many rounds of bullets and we threw grenades. We had a short burst on an automatic weapon so that you had some idea of what it was all about, but mostly you learned how to salute. How to salute officers and how to recognise officers and how

to, and this was a thing that was stressed, you never ever salute a warrant officer, because he’s not commissioned and he’s a warrant so you must never, never, never salute a warrant officer.

Not that I’m aware of. No, I don’t think so. But it was hammered into you that you must learn to know the difference. The warrant officer had a large white badge on his blue

uniform as distinct from the officers who had the stripes up on their shoulder. But I dare say many warrant officers got saluted because they looked the part. They wore the peaked cap and they wore a suit which was probably not much different to an officer’s. They were an officer when all was said and done, a warrant officer, but not a commissioned officer, you weren’t that.

“Sir”, I think. Yes, I think you called them “Sir”. I don’t remember to tell you the truth because the warrant officers, I went up through the ranks rather quickly and I was a corporal and a sergeant and at that level he’s not much different to you. You ate in the same mess as a warrant officer,

but there was always that big difference between any of the non-commissioned, or otherwise as we were sometimes called, and the commissioned officers, except when you get out on to the little tiny remote radar stations where rank didn’t seem to count for much. Some of the officers they maintained that strict discipline,

but it was to their own detriment because on a radar station we had only one officer and how can he remain on his own? He became the most lonely man in the world, the poor fellows. Back on a big unit, a big station, where there were many officers he’d have people to talk to but at a little radar station he wouldn’t. Getting back to what you were asking about,

about the rookies’ training, it was intense. There was also a, this all happened at exhibition, not the exhibition, I’m sorry, the showgrounds, and after we’d completed the rookies then we went to the [Royal] Exhibition Buildings. The exhibition buildings and the Melbourne Technical College, now called the Royal

Melbourne Institute of Technology, that was all part of No 1 School of Technical Training [formed in 1939, 1STT was the first of seven such schools, which eventually trained around 70,000 trainees during WWII], both buildings. And we were living in the exhibition buildings in dormitories there that they’d put temporary or improved fences up [thin plywood walls separated sleeping ‘quarters’ of around six beds]. Then on a Saturday morning we used to go out on route marches all the way around Fitzroy and Carlton.

But the humanity of some of these corporals again came to the fore and they’d always stop outside a pub.

Yes, we’d go for miles and miles around Carlton but they’d stop at a pub. Because back in those days I was a wowser, I didn’t drink, so that didn’t mean much.

No, not at all. I’m not aware of anything. And I’ve got to say that many of the people that I was with were teetotallers. In fact, I didn’t have my first taste of alcohol until perhaps 1946, when I was coming home

from the northern areas, the Kimberley, and I stopped off in Darwin and met up with an American with whom I’d been very pally with on one of these islands. And he said, “Last chance, have a whisky with me”. So I had two whiskies and that was my first, and not my last, taste of whisky.

I have a healthy respect for it,

yes. I’ve only ever been intoxicated once and that was after one of our reunions, post-war reunions, when I was pretty much the worse for wear and I was so sick and I have never ever been in that situation since.

Frustrating at

times, because they never ever told you anything. And I daresay that’s the biggest worry. If they told you that they can’t do anything at the moment because of this and this and this but, no, they’d just say “ Righto, halt, stand there” or maybe they might disperse you. I never ever had any problems with discipline. I was not, I can’t say that I never ever

rebelled, I used to cheat whenever I got the opportunity. Even at the showgrounds I found a way of getting out of there. I used to come home on occasions of a night when I shouldn’t have been at home.

I’d go AWL [absent without leave]. Notice how I say that too, I don’t say that the American way.

AWL .

Absent without, without being one word. AWL was the way we said it and the Americans called it AWOL, or AWOL I think they called it. And I’m very much an Australian and I’m not opposed to the Americans, don’t misunderstand me. The Americans

were the godsend, the saviours of Australia, so I’m pro-American but not at the expense of my Australianism. So, yes, I went AWL a few times but only when I was very sure of myself, not like some of my mates who would rush in without thinking and get lumbered. I never, ever was caught.

Just because you could, I suppose. No, I think there had to be some other activity, a family thing or something. I don’t know. I can’t recall. Years later when I was still in the air force I was in a training camp out

at Wonga Park [50km north-west of Melbourne]. The air force had decided that most of the airmen were not able to defend themselves, and that’s certainly so against a determined Japanese attack as could have happened in many places up in the islands.

In unarmed combat and that sort of thing and so they

sent us out to Wonga Park where you were taught all the secrets of unarmed combat, which was not very different to what we learned in Collingwood. There was a manoeuvre that was very common called a ‘Fitzroy uppercut’ and maybe you know about this one?

The Fitzroy uppercut. You were

battling with somebody and you got close to them and you got your right knee or your left knee and up into their nether regions, guaranteed to win any fight. And so we were taught that, but I also knew that from my Collingwood days, but I don’t know that it was ever practised because it can leave serious injuries, can’t it?

I have no memories of every applying that manoeuvre or having it applied. I never ever saw it used,

no. And this I didn’t say, at the air force, at the Wonga Park training camp, they were big on unarmed combat and they demonstrated, or this was the very same manoeuvre, and they called it by some much more professional name, which I cannot recall. But they had all sorts of manoeuvres like that for unarmed combat

and this happened after I’d been in New Guinea and I felt much more, it was a good move to be teaching people like that, but before you go to a war zone rather than after.

I’d been up in New Guinea for 19, 20 months before I came back and before I was posted up north for the second time, up

into the Kimberley area, that’s when I had to do the unarmed combat training.

14, yes.

I don’t know if it was a difficult time for young people because they got paid very poorly, of course. My first job was in a woollen mill run by a company that was big in those days, Foy & Gibson, and they had this wool treatment plant in

Wellington Street, Collingwood, which is now, I think, the police mobile branch, I think, workshops. I went there on the understanding that I would be apprenticed into their machine shop. But that time came and went and there was no sign of me moving from this dreadful job that I had in the scouring part of Foy & Gibson wool treatment plant.

So one of my mother’s friends, she had a boyfriend who was manager of a little printing, not a little printing company, quite a large place, which was owned by MacRobertson’s Confectionary. And they produced all the wrappers Minties and Max Mints and all those sorts of lollies were wrapped

in. And you see many lollies wrapped up in a similar fashion today. I was apprenticed in that trade and learned the art of rotary printing machines.

Yes, I do know. My first pay was

fourteen shillings a week. That was equal to my age, 14 shillings a week.

No, it was the legal amount that had to be paid to an apprentice in any trade I think, a first year apprentice.

Well, I started off working with a fellow who was a printer, operating a three colour aniline printing machine, printing the papers that finally found their way onto the lollies like Minties and Max Mints and all those sorts of things.

Chocolatines was another one that comes to mind, and it was very similar to what you see today. And all of that was printed on this little machine. And I worked as a learner with this fellow who was my boss, a man named Harry Nuttall, and he became almost a father figure to me, remembering that I didn’t have a father. After some

time they got a new machine, another aniline machine, which was three colour. It was the same as the other one, yes. That was my machine and I operated that alongside the first one and I was virtually responsible for that. On occasions I would get out, that was in an enclosed area. I got out of that

into another area where they had their great big machines for printing things like soap wrappers. Velvet soap was wrapped in waxed paper, in fact, that was the name of the company, Waxed Papers Pty Ltd. The building is still there in Wellington Street, opposite Peel Street. You may well know that, it’s close to Fitzroy and Smith Street.

And I think there was a hotel on the corner, the Sir Robert Peel Hotel, and that’s where Waxed Papers was. And I spent a very happy time there because this Harry Nuttall, he was a task master but he was a bloke who, as I said, filled my needs for a male model

role. But he was the boss as far as I was concerned. And I can remember one time when I’d done something wrong and in those days, of course, it was customary if the printers did something wrong he got a kick up the backside. But Harry Nuttall was a big man and I was a small 14 year old, 15, maybe 16 at the time, and I could climb up and down that machine and around and in and out much faster than he could. So

by the time he wore himself out chasing me he’d cooled down. There was one occasion when I didn’t get a kick up the bum. Nevertheless, I loved that bloke, he taught me many things. He was a good bloke.

Yes, I loved that. I did indeed, yes. And, of course, at that stage I was destined to be a printer for the rest of my

life. After the war I don’t know how I could have coped with that, because during the war I’d had my eyes opened to something new. And that’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to be a printer any more. But without that realisation, I think I would have been happy to be a printer. I don’t know. I suppose I didn’t have much in the way of ambition and I was certainly lacking in self esteem

perhaps, but that came from war service. Another reason why I have to be so thankful for the war, and that’s a dreadful thing to say.

Yes, well, you do that but more particularly,

you see, I had nothing really to be proud of. I had got an odd scholarship or two as a kid but nothing more than that. But during the war my self esteem went up enormously because I was a good radar mechanic. And it’s self esteem that’s so important. And then I started to realise the lack of education and I spent a lot of

time during the war studying, to the extent that after the war I was able to get myself organised into a diploma course. In those days Melbourne Technical College wasn’t a university as it is today so I got a four-year diploma. But no way I could have even considered that without that lifting in self esteem which came from the

war, plus the opportunity through the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme, it was a blessing for me.

It was when I was, I suppose, 10, 9 or 10, when I was living in Collingwood, in Langridge Street, Collingwood. The

fellow over the road from us, a man named Mr Kirk, he had a valve wireless set. You didn’t call them radios in those days they were wireless sets. And it had many knobs on the front and that seemed to be the criteria for a radio or wireless. It had to have many knobs for twiddling. He showed me this radio

and I was fascinated. He, I think, was the man who got me started in building the crystal sets. And, possibly, he was the man who gave me a pair of earphones, because without a pair of earphones you can’t get anywhere. He also helped me to get the wherewithal to make up my own little radio set, crystal set.

And I had that thing built and ready to go at a time when I was taken over by appendicitis and had to have it [appendix] removed. Everything was ready to go and all I needed was an antenna, an aerial. I had put up a pole which was a branch of a poplar tree I think they are, which lined the sides of Langridge Street.

And it had a long straight branch which I fastened to the back of our outside toilet and that’s when I was stricken with the appendicitis. When I came home after having spent four days in hospital plus another three in after care, I’m home, I’m thoroughly bored and I’m on my own because my mother had to go to work, of course. And I’ve got a

radio, a little crystal radio that I’ve made, which is ready to go and I haven’t got an antenna except the pole was there. So, eventually, I decided that I couldn’t resist it, I had to shin up that pole and attach my copper wire to the top of it. And just at that time my mother came home and caught me up the pole seven days after surgery. I have never forgotten that experience. I don’t recall what she did to me. Obviously,

she couldn’t have belted [smacked] me, I suppose, which was a common treatment. You got a whack over the ears and things like this. But I don’t know that that happened. But I had my radio and it worked. It worked very effectively. So that was my interest in crystal radio sets.

At that time, no. It was most unusual. Mr

Kirk’s radio was a battery-operated thing. An enormous big thing with enormous big batteries, car battery type of thing. Of course later on, particularly after my mother remarried, we had a radio set which was enormous and probably about the same size as a modern-day television set and we had one of those.

And that was the thing that I heard the pronouncement of the war with Germany. So at that stage I think they were becoming, coming [popular], certainly at the time when a Ralph got a radio most other people would have had one. Prior to that, no, not even crystal sets. Not too many kids had crystal sets. I can recall later on when I went to the

Abbotsford Technical College they had a hobbies competition and I won a prize with my little radio set because it had so many knobs on it. They were totally unnecessary but it looked good and it won the competition.

On the radio?

Anything, I think. In those days it was mostly music. There was very little talkback because nobody had phones, I suppose, or very few people had phones so you couldn’t have the talkback radio as you have today. I think it was mostly music, but it was the novelty of it. The fact that you could

sit in bed, and that’s how I mostly had it, because it was tied down to where the antenna came in through the window of my upstairs back bedroom window and it had to be there, it couldn’t be anywhere else. So it was mostly used when I was in bed at night and should have gone to sleep.

I suppose, yes,

I can’t recall at that stage. Of course later on when we had the bigger radio and I was in my, just before joining the air force in my late teens, mid teens perhaps, yes, there were so many serials on then. One Man’s Family [popular American radio show], I think comes to mind as a popular thing at the time and, yes, we listened to those. But in the

crystal set days, this is when I’m 10 years of age, 1931, I don’t know that there was much in the way of that sort of thing.

That would have been, I think, at that stage my mother had remarried and we had a radio. That might not have been the norm

to have a radio such as we had. I’m not sure, maybe so. My stepfather was a tradesman and he was earning comparatively good money. He was a cooper. He manufactured beer barrels, wooden beer barrels, a real craftsman. I recall when one of my teenage mates

got married, and this would have been after the war, my stepfather made a little wooden biscuit barrel and it was a real work of art. I had the pleasure about two years ago of seeing that again. It’s still a beautiful bit of woodcraft that my stepfather had made.

No, he didn’t. He worked at what was called the Yorkshire Brewery and that was almost, it probably was next door to the place that I worked at, and it still exists in Wellington Street, between Peel and Langridge Street. A big tall tower of brown and cream bricks all beautifully

tuck pointed, a real work of art in bricklaying I would say. And that, as I said, used to be the Yorkshire Brewery, taken over by Carlton Brewery to form Carlton & United Breweries, as also was the Abbotsford [Co-Operative] brewery [in 1924]. But he was working at the Yorkshire, which they had converted into just beer barrels and he was a real

master at that.

Yes. He was not ever really a father in that he never interfered. He was there and he was providing an income, which was

a godsend to us and to my mother because it meant that she just didn’t have to go out to work as she had done for all those years. He was a very taciturn sort of a man. He had come from Scotland, from the northern parts of Scotland, right up on the northern part, I can’t think of the name of the area [Sutherland, described as a maritime county in the far north], but I was told in more recent years that this is where all the McKays came from.

Whether that be true or not, I’m not sure. But he was a good man and I never ever had any problems with him. One of the things that I used to enjoy with him, whilst he worked in a brewery and instead of having morning and afternoon tea, they had morning and afternoon beer.

During the week he was never ever intoxicated, but Friday nights and Saturdays he would be much the worse for liquor I would say. Friday night he would come staggering home and he would always have a couple of mutton birds under his arm, and I would enjoy joining him in those mutton birds. Nowadays, of course, it is highly illegal to touch mutton birds, you cannot even help one.

If you see one, as we often used to down at Phillip Island [100km south-east of Melbourne], when we had a house down there, you cannot touch them, but back in those days they were fair game and every Friday night he’d come home, it might have been Saturday night, I hope it was Saturday night because that might have relieved me of a conscience problem because of a Friday night as a

Catholic in those days, meat was forbidden. Perhaps you could argue that mutton birds are not birds, but they’re fish.

If it was a Saturday night it wasn’t a problem, but I don’t know.

Mutton birds live in burrows in the ground. There is a mutton bird

rookery down at South Melbourne beach, or used to be. Down at Phillip Island, near where we had our house at Cape Woolamai [headland on the south-eastern side of Phillip Island], is a mutton bird sanctuary, and the area is absolutely covered with mutton bird holes, perhaps one metre apart. It is one of the

things the tourists are never told about. They go to Phillip Island to see the penguins and they might in, say, September, they might see two or three hundred penguins, if they raise their eyes and look down onto the horizon they might see perhaps two or three million mutton birds flying around waiting for darkness before they come in and land at Cape Woolamai. And to go down to Cape Woolamai was

always a thing that we did with any visitors we had staying over the weekend or something like that. You’d just stand there in the rookery and see these mutton birds flying past your ears, they were so close, they’d never ever touch you, they had some sort of radar perhaps that enabled them to know that you were there. But in the days before the protection, people used to go and

‘hook’, as they called it, hook the eggs out, one egg per burrow, and they would hook the egg out and then use it for whatever, which meant that that particular pair of birds would not have an offspring for that year.

He used to buy them at the local fish shop. Fish shops always had mutton birds for sale. They were smoked and they were flattened

somehow, squashed flat, and were probably not much thicker than an average-sized magazine, very enjoyable.

Can’t you? I love them. And I think I used to like the company of my stepfather under those circumstances. He would be decidedly merry, of course, from some other

influence and to be in his company like that was the sort of thing that I think I needed. Having been deprived of a male role model all my younger, formative years I think I was looking for that sort of thing perhaps, who knows.

Rabbit.

Goodness. That was about all the meat we ever ate, rabbit, ‘underground poultry’ as it was called. And indeed it was common practice for a fellow to be going past perhaps two or sometimes three times a week selling rabbits from a little horse and cart arrangement that he had. And a pair or rabbits were, whatever, I can’t remember how much, but

they were poor man’s meat. It was good.

No. I don’t think there was at that time coming around those parts of Collingwood because they wouldn’t have done much

business around there. Maybe they would go somewhere else, I don’t know, but certainly I have no recollection of anyone doing that when I lived in Collingwood and later in Abbotsford, which is also part of Collingwood. No, never.

Well, at that time of course we had the radio when my mother was married. And that was when we had some of the luxuries, if you can call them that, which we’d never ever had before.

So, yes, we would have heard things on the radio, the newsreels, etc. But I think the thing that made the biggest impression on me would have been the various posters, billboards, that were everywhere exhorting young men to join the services. There’d be these horrible depictions of the

Japanese soldier chasing the women and all of those dreadful thoughts.

I can’t say I do. There probably were. Certainly there were, well, here again I’m only telling you what I’ve read probably in later years. They had these recruiting marches where they would march from one country town to another, I never saw it in the

city, and they would march along and entice young men to join their ranks and go to the recruiting centre in the next town. And I suspect that they would have had some sort of rousing recruiting song or something, but I was never ever aware of it myself. I don’t know.

I dare say, yes, I dare say. I can’t remember anything in particular because, as I’ve said to you, Europe didn’t really affect me a great deal. It was too far away, too remote. And I also felt that maybe Europe didn’t exist because Australia was the centre of the universe.

Why do you ask me a question like that? I had no way of knowing other than that the threat was said to be there. I don’t know. It just shows you the power

of propaganda perhaps. But in this case it was real, as I was subsequently to find out.

I can answer that question only in this way,

that before Japan became an apparent threat I would say it was not a subject of discussion. The war in Europe was just a casual thing. You might comment on it if there’d been some sort of a victory or a loss it might be mentioned but no serious discussion. And for that matter, even when the

Japanese were coming down towards Australia, I don’t know that people talked about it either, certainly not amongst my mates. I don’t recall ever having an in depth discussion with any of my friends about, it was a personal thing. As far as I can remember I don’t have any recollection of any discussions.

One of my mates, teenage mates, who we still contact each other after all these years, I recall when he came and told me that he had joined the army. I was completely unaware that he was thinking of this and he was unaware that I was thinking of joining the air force. So, obviously, there was no

discussion about these sort of things it was something that you did in your own heart for whatever reason. Strange isn’t it? I don’t know. I’ve heard stories and read stories in years since the war of how groups of fellows would say, “Let’s go and join up”. I never saw any of that.

I don’t know that such a group decision would have influenced me. That seems too impromptu and unreasoned and I would never ever do that even in those days.

Good. Of course, in that rookie course there was only one other fellow in that particular course, and let’s face it there were hundreds of courses going through at the same time, even at the showgrounds. Well, that’s an exaggeration but

maybe 50 different courses going through. There was only one of that group of maybe 25, 30 men, who was mustered as a trainee radio location mechanic, as we were called in those days, the others, once the rookies course was finished, went their ways. So you had no opportunity to make any sort of lasting

friendship. And even that one bloke, a fellow called [Robert Charles] ‘Bob’ Popham, I saw him occasionally but he certainly was not one of my friends of all these years. That didn’t come until I actually got on to radar stations. And the first radar station was on up in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, some of those fellows,

those who are alive, I’m still in contact with them and still enjoy their company. My closest, absolutely closest friend ever, was a bloke with whom I palled up [with] when we were on our way to Port Moresby [New Guinea] from Townsville. And we were very, very close for many, many years. Well, he became president of

the Victorian RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] Radar Association and I was the foundation secretary–treasurer. So we were hand in glove all the time. But even apart from that we would have been pretty close. Unfortunately, he died a few years ago. But that’s when friendships formed. The air force was different in the sense that you

didn’t join a battalion and stay with it for the entire war service. On radar stations you would go to one station, the first one I went to I was there for eight months and then I just wandered around other stations all over Australia and Papua New Guinea. You don’t get time to form close friendships but you get to know people and

maybe you can start forming a friendship through our radar association post-war. It’s different entirely to the navy or the army.

Well, Melbourne Technical College it was. Yes, you used to have a morning parade

outside the exhibition buildings. In between the exhibition buildings and what is Fitzroy Gardens is a large concourse there and we set to form up there. There would be many hundreds of men from all sorts of trades, musterings [RAAF term for a trade or job]. At that time, I suppose, we would be grouped into squads, we’d go into different classes. They would then

march us down with a single drummer, he would rattle away in front of us and we’d march down that street behind Rathdowne Street, behind the exhibition buildings, and eventually find our way down Bowen Street, which is the street that goes through the middle of what is today the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. We would do

radio and electrical theory, which was in the radio school right on the corner of Bowen and the next street up, Franklin Street is it? Whatever it is, I don’t know. Or maybe you’d go over the road to a little old building they had there, long since demolished, and do mathematics, or you could go somewhere else. But

that was a formation of many friendships too, because we were all radar, or radio location, trainees. And we might have been going to different areas, some might have gone to Western Australia and other parts of Australia and some, like myself, were destined to go to radar school in Richmond [70km north-west of Sydney] in New South Wales and then on to New

Guinea. You still had contacts with them but not like there would have been in the army.

It would be a column of about six abreast and it might be, say, two or three hundred metres. They used to stop the traffic.

We didn’t have traffic lights in those days but there would always be a policeman. He would come along with us and stop the traffic. I think there were two of them as we marched down with this drummer rattling away in front. And we would come back in the evening in the same way. After a while at the exhibition [building] I was allowed to live out and I got a

small allowance to cover my living costs, but I had to be back at the exhibition [building] to be in time for morning parade. I had to be there.

Yes, but I was only there for about a week at the most and then I got this living out allowance and was able to go

home.

Yes.

In the earlier times, the times that I spent in Melbourne,

I used to see them about and I know that there were innumerable fights between the Australian army blokes and the Americans. Being a wimp as I am, and always have been, I didn’t get into any fights with Americans or anybody for that matter. I can’t say that I ever saw anything of any significance,

and this, of course, was early in the time that the Americans came onto the scene in Australia. When I went to Townsville on my way to Port Moresby, yes, there were many more per head of Australians, shall I say. But Townsville,

of course, is a very much smaller place than Melbourne. It wasn’t until I came back to Melbourne after the war that I was more staggered by the American presence in Melbourne. And that would be something like two years later or 18, 20 months later. It was just incredible, the American presence, but I had little contact with them.

The buildings that were occupied by the American forces like, for instance, the Royal Melbourne Hospital was an American hospital, Royal Park [Parkville, an inner Melbourne suburb], a vast expanse of parkland was occupied by Americans, it was a big American camp. So

Royal Park, in particular, you had the Royal Melbourne Hospital, which was American, you had the camp site, all divided up into little streets with street names and street numbers, I think they were, and all these buildings were numbered. It was a completely American scene and, of course, let’s not forget that next door is the Melbourne zoo.

And there was a rude comment saying, “That’s very apt to have that alongside the Americans”.

I’m not sure of what time you’re talking.

I wasn’t discharged until 1946 and by that time there was

not an American to be seen. All I ever knew of Royal Park, as I was just talking about, was what was left because I went through Royal Park in the discharge procedures. And I was absolutely staggered at this large town that had been built on Royal Park. Of course, there’s not a vestige of it now. It was just incredible. A lot of the major

buildings around Melbourne were all occupied by American hierarchy. There was the fellow, the American, I forget his name, Lewinsky [Edward Joseph ‘Eddie’ Leonski], I think, and he’d been charged with murder. His court case took place in a

building which is still there I believe on the corner of Victoria Street and Lygon Street, just opposite the Trades Hall. That’s not a big place at all but that was an American establishment and that’s where he was sentenced to death [Leonski was found guilty of murdering three Melbourne women and sentenced to death; he was hung at Pentridge Prison on 9 November 1942]. I often think about it as I go past that place, but everywhere you went the Americans had taken everything.

What they did?

I can’t remember that I do. You’ve got to remember that when I came back from New Guinea to Melbourne within about two days I had gone

through the disembarkation process and was sent on leave. I had a long stretch of leave and immediately after that I found myself on the way north again. So you didn’t get much time to wander around during that time. I suppose the time when I was most surprised about the American presence was after they had

gone, after the war, because I was very late in being discharged. The war ended in 1945 and I didn’t get discharged until January 1946 because of the reasons, by this time I’m a sergeant radio mechanic and I had been delegated to take over an American marine station, long range

navigation. And this was essential for the safe navigation of the planes and ships which were bringing Australian prisoners of war back home. The Australian Government wanted it to continue but the Americans wanted it to go, so the Americans said “You take it, you operate it”. And I happened to be on the other end of that island at that time and so I was moved down there.

Yes.

Not long. When I first arrived up there I was sent out to what they called the ‘pool’, this was a camp in which they had an enormous number of

air force men who were coming and going and being organised into different groups. So I was at the pool for a week or two perhaps at the most and at that time I was mustered into a radar station. In fact, at that time there was 304, 305

and 306 Radar Stations that were formed. And the formation, of course, is not limited to just the collecting of men but all the wherewithal, the barracks equipment, the beds and the blankets and all those sorts of things had to be procured and stacked in a safe place and got ready for shipment. And we took all that stuff with us.

So I was at the pool perhaps for about two or three weeks total. And then we moved to Castle Hill [granite outcrop that towers over Townsville], where we had our first opportunity in practical experience of operating the radar station.

306.

That was the one that I was on, 304, 305

and 306 were formed in the same area both from the pool and that place on Castle Hill. So the mechanics from the three stations all went through the processes of assembling the radar that we had and then we handed it over to the operators and they had a go at operating it, although they were getting

experience operating on a permanent radio station that was operating not far away in Townsville, but I can’t remember just where. So after a short time we had everything disassembled and repacked and ready to go. And eventually the time came when 304 and 305 were shipped out

and 306 was left, but it didn’t take long before we went.

Initially at Port Moresby, and we went to a little place called Konedobu [the country’s administrative centre], which is what you might call a suburb of Port Moresby. We were

in waiting there I suppose you would say, because at the time the air force told you nothing. We didn’t have the faintest idea where we were going or what we were doing. And we waited and waited and waited. We were destined to go to Wau [20km south-west of Bulolo]. And at that time Wau had become a major battle zone so they reckoned that they couldn’t safely get us

in. Perhaps I should talk a little bit about the history of what was happening, is that okay?

The Japanese had first made their attack on Papua New Guinea in the Milne Bay area [eastern-most bay on New Guinea island], which was a combined American and Australian operation and the Japanese had suffered their first defeat ever in a naval

and ground-based troop engagement. So from there they then went up to Buna [200km north-west of Port Moresby] and they thought they would try coming across that way to get to Port Moresby, over the Kokoda Trail. Here again they were defeated. And so that was the time, we arrived in Port Moresby just at the time when the

Japs were being driven back over the Kokoda Trail. And then they decided that they would try and come in through Salamaua, which is further up the coast, because at Salamaua they were only 30 or 40 kilometres from Lae, which they also had captured and they had formed a large air base there, a very large air base. And they reckoned that with the

support of aircraft they might make a better landing there, or so I presume. So they were going to try and come overland from Salamaua to Wau and or Bulolo. Bulolo and Wau are about 20 kilometres apart. And, indeed, they got to Wau and that’s where the big battle was. And that’s when they decided, the authorities, that they couldn’t send 306 in because

they didn’t really have control of the air, being so close, something like 70 kilometres away from a major Japanese air base. So we had to wait about a month before it was deemed safe to be able to fly us in. And that’s how we eventually got to, we passed Wau to Bulolo.

We drilled. One of the things that I will never ever forget is we had a fellow, a pilot officer, who came and was teaching us bayonet drill, which we had

learned very well I imagine in our rookies course, bayonet drill. This fellow was a very sadistic sort of bloke and he would give the command to point, which means holding your rifle out at arm’s length with a bayonet on the end of it, and then he would proceed to go around very slowly, individual by individual, correcting their attitude, the way they were holding it.

By the time he got to the last bloke the poor fellow’s arms would be almost breaking and he would say, “Look, I’ll have to go through it again”. And it was dreadful, the strain on your arm, but that’s what he did to us. That was one of the activities. Radar mechanics were a bit cunning perhaps in the sense that we had technical work to do, we couldn’t avoid that bayonet drill, that

had to be done, but we filled our time in pulling out valves and wiping them clean and putting them back in the box or whatever it was. That sort of thing to keep us looking as though we were doing something useful. The operators, they were sent to nearby radar stations that were already operating and they got operating experience there. The cooks were taken over by,

there was a big operational base just around the corner from Konedobu and they were employed around there and so were the guards. I dare say the radar mechanics got it the best because they could claim that they had very important technical work to do and who’s going to argue with them. I think

I’ve got to say that our CO [commanding officer], he didn’t give us away.

Yes, the very first night we arrived on the ship. We went up on the Taroona who had been a ship which operated between Melbourne and Tasmania for many years [beginning in 1935 and up to 1959]. My mother told me how she came over on the Taroona.

So we went up there on that, but when we arrived it was in the very late afternoon and we had to unload the ship, blazing lights and we got everything off the ship and around to the Konedobu, it was a golf links, actually, prior to the war, and we got around to there

and thought “Okay, now we can relax”. And that’s when the raid came, a single Japanese bomber cruising around all night and dropping an occasional bomb. We were underneath a place, it was called ‘Ack Ack Hill’ because it had a number of anti-aircraft guns mounted on top of it, and it seems to me that that would have

been a target that the bomber dropped his occasional bombs onto because we were too bloody close, and [that was] the first night. And I still have a recollection of one fellow, after a while, of course, the plane would just go around and do nothing for quite a while, and one of the fellows was a bit blasé about this and said, “I’m not going to get out and get into a slit trench”,

so he stayed in bed. Anyhow, down came a bomb and exploded some, a couple of hundred metres away and out he came. He didn’t bother to take his mosquito net off, he just came out with his mosquito net wrapped around him and straight into a slit trench. Another little episode, on that first night when we were unloading the

ship, unloading our stuff off the ship, of course, we didn’t get a meal, so we anticipated this and when we were unloading some of the cases of canned food we grabbed a couple of these and took them with it. So during the time when the bomber was overhead and nothing was happening we said, “Well, why don’t we have something to eat?” So we got a couple of these cans and

opened them with a bayonet. There we are in the bottom of the trench polishing this stuff off and it must have been crook because within about half an hour we were as sick as dogs. Here we are heaving our hearts out, terrified by the bomber overhead, he was dropping bombs probably a kilometre away, but the noise was enormous.

Just one plane and he could fly around for hours.

Every night.

Yes, the idea being to disrupt people and deny them a night’s sleep and all that sort of thing. It was very effective.

Yes, of course, they had many aircraft but not night fighters.

Later on they got the so-called night fighters, the [Northrop P-61] Black Widow, I think, was one which had some sort of radar on it but that was after the time that I was there. But they were so high and a single plane with no light on them whatsoever. Occasionally a search light would pick up one. That was a problem too, because the search lights were on ‘Ack Ack Hill’

and that’s where the bomber would drop his bombs, on the search lights, which was just next door to us. But no one was ever hurt and it was a nuisance, nuisance bombing.

About?

No, because you never ever stabbed a man with it, you only stabbed a bag of straw and it was a lot of fun. I’ve got to say that most people enjoyed drill, I got a lot of satisfaction, when we’d reached the stage of being able to drill very well there was a great degree of satisfaction in knowing that as a group of

men you were able to perform the drill with perfection, I found that very satisfying. And the bayonet drill, I’m talking about the formal bayonet drill, formal in the sense that you do it as a squad without moving anywhere. But then you would do the bayonet practice, a different thing, where you would charge at a bag of straw and you’d let out frightening screams to frighten the

hell out of the bag of straw and stab it and all this sort of nonsense. It might well have been the sort of thing that we had to do and who knows, you had to know how to do it.

Yes, of course.

I don’t think it was a problem. I never ever got to do it so I don’t really know, but I think I would have had no difficulty in shooting a Japanese soldier because if I hadn’t have done it to him he’d have done it to me.

So I think that was the attitude. In recent years when I’ve had Japanese people in my home I’m horrified at the thought that that man standing there that I could have killed him once. It’s not a nice thought.

Yes.

No. These are

students who come here to learn English, young people and delightful people and good looking people, nothing like the propaganda posters, just lovely people, and I’m absolutely horrified at the thought that one day I could have shot them. To stick a bayonet into them, well, you would have because your own life would have been threatened.

Yes, I’m sure.

I don’t think you can answer that until you’ve done it. I’ve never been

aware that I have been troubled by that thought at the time, never. It was war and you can justify it in the sense that we didn’t declare war on the Japanese, they didn’t declare war on anybody, they just came and attacked people. They attacked all those little countries, the islands in the south-west Pacific, and here they are they’re coming to Australia.

They’d never declared war. In other words, it’s not our doing and maybe you can justify it from that point of view. I had no horror at the thought of it at the time, none at all.

Well, if they were conscientious objectors I don’t suppose they would have been in the air force anyhow.

Were there? Okay, I’ll take your word for that but, no, we were there to do a job. As to whether we killed anybody, I don’t know. You see this is the point with radar, you don’t know, but we were instrumental in being able to direct fighter aircraft, bombers, to

where there were Japanese targets. We could save Allied aircraft who were lost and things like this, but there were many, many Japanese flights of bombers that were attacked due to the activity of radar stations. But then, on the other hand of course, we probably saved many Allied lives because we gave them the

best air raid warning that was possible to get. Normally, we could pick up aircraft at, say, 100 to 150 miles using the dimensions of those days and, since they only travelled at perhaps a hundred and something miles an hour, you are looking at perhaps an hour’s warning. But Bulolo, which is in a valley,

70 kilometres from that Japanese air base at Lae, you couldn’t pick them up because of the mountains, you had to wait until they got sufficiently high that you could see them over the top of the mountains. And, incredibly, almost every time that the Japanese formed a bombing squadron that’s exactly what they did, they took off from the Lae aerodromes and they circled up and up and up and up

waiting for all the other bombers to come and they had to gain the height of course before they could fly over the mountains to get to Wau and even to get to Port Moresby. So once they got high enough we could pick them up. Now, if they were coming to Wau, which was only about say 75, 80 kilometres away, the warnings would only be minutes.

But sometimes you’d say, “Well we’ve been responsible for killing so many Japanese pilots, maybe”.

Sorry, say that again.

No, we went straight to Bulolo, straight to Bulolo, not to Wau. We overflew Wau to get to Bulolo.

Yes, yes. They couldn’t bring the planes in whilst they didn’t have control on the ground because there was a large Japanese force on the ground trying to capture Wau and there were some incredible battles that went on

there. It’s interesting, the airstrip at Wau has quite a slope of it of some perhaps 20 degrees and not a long strip, so the heavy transport planes bringing in supplies for the army fellows would have to come down over the mountains and down to the bottom of the valley and then come up the hill and land going uphill, which meant if they got into trouble there was no way they could take off again.

And then they’d turn around and fly down into the valley and then have to be able to get up the other side. That was the Wau airstrip.

No I didn’t land there on our initial trip. I went to Wau many times, yes, whilst I was at Bulolo for whatever reasons, I can’t recall, perhaps to go and get special supplies. There was one occasion when we

were short of a particular component for the radar, a valve perhaps, and that was flown into Wau and we had to go up there on the road to get that valve and bring it back, something like that.

About 20 kilometres, in that order.

Yes, that’s interesting. We took off from Port Moresby, we went out to the airport, aerodrome, airstrip we called them, and we loaded up our planes and then we were put on hold, and then they came back and said “No, you can’t go, unload the aircraft”. So we had to unload everything

again and leave it on the ground. The aircraft would remain there but you’d have to unload it. And then you’d spend the night sleeping under the wings of the aeroplane and load it up again the next morning. And we did that twice, or three times, before we were able to leave. Then we took off and away we went. To get to Wau and Bulolo you have to go through a gap in the

mountains, the heavy transport planes, they would circle around for a while until they gained sufficient height and then they would fly through the gap. I was horrified, I suppose, to look out of these little portholes and you see mountains within perhaps 20 or 30 metres from the ends of the wings of the plane and much higher than what you were.

So that was the normal story going through the gap and then when you got to the other side, of course you came down, flying downhill, as it were, towards the little airstrip we had at Bulolo. While we were waiting in, once we learned where we were going, there were all sorts of stories because

Bulolo and Wau area was said to be the centre of a particularly fierce tribe of natives called the Kukakukas, and they were head-hunters, pygmies, little fellows about so big, but particularly fierce. They had harassed the miners who used to come from Salamaua up to

Bulolo from about 1900 on when the gold was found in the Bulolo–Wau area. So here we are, we’re going to this place with all these little fellows who’ve got such a dreadful reputation, and I remember when we came out of the aeroplane at Bulolo, here on the airstrip are probably two or three hundred of these blokes waiting. And there was some trepidation in

us to see these fierce-looking little blokes. Anyway, they were being organised to unload our aircraft for us so they were welcome from that point of view. But nevertheless there was always a healthy respect for those fellows. You didn’t take any liberties with them. And the story goes that the AIF fellows used to keep them busy by going

out and destroying their villages and while they were rebuilding their villages there was comparative peace and quietness. That was the story, true or not I don’t know.

There was a large number of the 3rd Division, they were the initial ones. The 3rd Division were

what we called the militia, they were conscripted fellows who did a fantastic job up in the Wau area.

No, they were there initially to defend Wau in that big battle that took place just before we got there. There was also the 7th [Division] and, I think, the 9th [Division] might have been there. So there were three divisions. Not complete divisions but there were many,

many Australian troops there. I don’t know that there were any Americans; I didn’t ever see an American there other than a couple of incidental ones. There was an American anti-aircraft battalion just up the hill from where our camp was at Bulolo, but that’s the only Americans that I ever saw.

Yes, yes.

Bulolo had been a very prosperous gold ridging area. The ridging didn’t take place until about 1931, or perhaps 1928, but gold had been found in that area from about 1900 and people used to walk overland from Salamaua to Bulolo and Wau and pan for

gold up in the Edie Creek, which is a creek which flows down the side of Mount Kaindi, which is not far from Wau. And the gold was very plentiful. Eventually, that was all taken, but the gold from that Edie Creek, the inaugural gold, used to come down and was deposited in Bulolo valley as a

placer gold. That is like large areas [of surface sediment] mixed up with, amounts of gold mixed up in very much larger amounts of dirt. Hence it was not economic to hand pan it, but it was very suitable for gold ridging, but the gold ridging didn’t take place until about 1931 because there were no roads. There was no access to Bulolo or Wau other than by

aircraft or by some of these footpaths with carriers [porters who carry equipment]. Carriers used to take 10 days to travel about 50 kilometres from Salamaua to Wau because of the dreadful terrain and carrying whatever the load was. Otherwise, it would have to be all flown in. They had three aircraft, Junkers,

I forget the name, 131s [most likely the Junkers Ju 52 tri-motor transport], I think they were. And every bit of material was flown in on those three aircraft, that included the towns, the two towns, all the building material, it included all the building material for the hydro-electric station at Bulolo, all the transmission towers, the transmission lines and the dredges. Now the dredges,

they weight about 2000 tons each, and they were flown in and unloaded from the aircraft through an opening in the top of the fuselage and deposited by the cranes right on the site where they were going to be built, assembled. So, ultimately, we had eight of these dredges. That was a great

source of distraction for us because when you were off duty you could go down to the dredgers and just take a little hand brush and sweep the deck of the dredge and take it home and pan it and you’d get a few specks of gold. If you really knew where to look on a dredge you could get more than a few specks, I suppose [you] might have got about four or five ounces of gold.

Spare time activity, yes.

Well, it didn’t take long before it was a pointless exercise on the dredges nearby, but somehow or other we found out about a dredge which was much further north than where we were up at what they called Wampit Valley. It seemed to be unknown to the general number of troops that were there,

so two or three of my mates and myself we decided we’d go up there one day. When we got there we found some army blokes and they had known exactly where to look and they had a stack of gold, or amalgam. They used to pour mercury into the mixture of dirt and gold and the mercury would amalgamate with the gold particles and form a solid

brick about so dimensioned by about that thick in a particular part of the dredge. And these fellows had known exactly where to look and they had a stack of gold about that square on the bottom and about so high [300mm square by about half a metre high], an enormous weight, and there were four of them.

Yes, particularly as they had to go across a river by flying fox, which was just a rope with a pulley on it and you

hooked the pulley onto the rope and grabbed the rope and pulled yourself across. And they had to do that with all that gold. However, they were very nice, they left us the dregs. They left us the crumbs on the deck of the dredge and that was the most gold that I ever got up there. That was about, I don’t know, four or five ounces.

I don’t think a great deal of

damage had been done to the dredges but the hydro-electric power station had been destroyed and without power the dredges were completely unable to move. So the Australian Army, the commandos, had gone through everything and destroyed everything including those three aircraft that had been so instrumental in

transporting all of that equipment from Salamaua to the Bulolo area. Those three aircraft were sitting on our little airstrip all blown to bits. The factory which maintained the dredges had been destroyed. All the homes, and there were a large number of homes where the European workers on the

dredges lived, they were all destroyed, everything, but not entirely because there were so many things that we found in amongst the ruins of the houses. In one of the tents in the radar camp they had a little pedal organ which they had found, it was scorched but it was still operable. And I used to have a bit of a sing song

there. Someone could play the organ and indeed one of the commanding officers that we had he broke that standing rule that you must not fraternise with the other ranks, he used to go over to that tent and play the organ. We found a lot of electrical fittings which were very useful because we had power of course to run our radar station so we had power lines running down the streets,

not to mention the big high voltage transmission lines which were still there. So we were able to put a little bit of power around to neighbouring units, and I’m talking about army units, where there conditions were quite dreadful. I’m talking about the small groups of soldiers who were camped in little huts near our radar station camp and their

conditions were absolutely deplorable. So we were able to put a light and a little power point over there. But all of that stuff had been flown in on these three aircraft and everything was destroyed, everything. But there was no point in destroying the dredges because they could not be operated so that was the situation as we found it when we arrived there.

You’ve got to ask that question, why? However, had the Japanese succeeded in capturing Wau and Bulolo it would have been invaluable. No doubt it was considered to be good policy. Without the greater knowledge you can only question these things? In the

event, of course, it was just sheer destruction, but it may well have been a good strategy otherwise. Fortunately, not so.

That was the story. It made a bit of sense to us but it doesn’t sound very nice and kind.

No, never, but they had the reputation, deservedly so I think, from pre-war days that they were a pretty bad lot. Well, bad by our standards. There was a lot of inter-tribal fighting and

cannibalism, which was more a traditional thing rather than a necessary thing and I don’t know much about that. And, of course, remember, we are 20-year-olds, impressionable young men who’ve never been in a situation like that before and every story like that we’re going to believe every bit of it but it may have been quite wrong.

Certainly in the eight months that I spent at Bulolo I saw many of these little men and I never ever heard of a single problem, never ever. So I can’t say.

Almost none. They were controlled by a group of us called the

ANGAU [Australia and New Guinea Administrative Unit] force. I dare say it was a group of the Australian Army that had been recruited from the people who had controlled the natives pre-war who knew how to talk to them and to get them organised to do work and that sort of thing. I never had much to do with them. The only one time I ever came in

contact with a fellow and that was when I was leaving Bulolo and coming back to Port Moresby. At that time very few planes came into Wau so I came back on a road that had been constructed from Wau over the mountains down to a place called Bulldog [60km south-west of Wau], which was at the head of the Lakekamu River,

and it was used as a supply route. The road had been built in [an] almost impossible situation over the mountains, the ranges. And on the way back we came to a place called ‘Centre Camp’, for the reason it was half way between Wau and Bulldog, and being a Saturday afternoon we had to stop there on the Sunday. And I was warned under no

circumstances was I to go beyond the boundaries of the camp, which were clearly defined on the roadway and I must always at every moment have my rifle with me. Well, that was pretty common anyhow, I had no problem with that. So anyway, it came to the Sunday morning and I go out for a bit of a walk and I get up towards the end of the camp limits and this fellow stepped out of the bush, God, I nearly died of fright.

He’s done up in all his finery and everything, he’s got a bow which is about twice the size as he is and he looked absolutely fearsome. So I didn’t know what the hell to say. I didn’t know whether to shoot him or what. So I said, “G’day”, and he came back to me in reasonably good English and said, “Good morning, Taubada”. I got talking with him and it turned out he was the local

school teacher and Sunday morning was his day off and he liked to get out in his traditional garb and go out and do a little bit of shooting with his bow and arrow. I had quite a long talk with him and it was very interesting. He frightened the hell out of me because there’s him and there’s me and he’s got a bow and arrow and I’ve got a rifle.

Taubada was a name that the natives

addressed the white man by and had done for many years during the time when the white man, Taubada…

I had no need to, no occasion to. I think that would be the only time, there was another time when I, but, no, you didn’t.

They only talked pidgin, anyhow, and that to my mind is a stupid sort of a language. It’s effective but why they can’t teach them proper English I will never know, instead of teaching this bloody nonsense that went on. But maybe this is what the native can understand, I don’t know.

I never had the opportunity,

because it was only the time when I met this fellow at ‘Centre Camp’ and another occasion when we went out trying to find an American airman who had been shot down and we were allocated a native who knew the area to come with us. This fellow had no upper lip. It had all been eaten away with some sort of a cancer or

something or other, but he was a willing enough sort of little bloke but I’d have been in his company for one day. And the other fellow at ‘Centre Camp’, perhaps 20 minutes. No need to learn and no opportunity to learn. No need. To answer your question, no I didn’t.

Yes, yes, yes, but you had to know where to look. These dredges were floating. They used to make their own pool of water. The Bulolo River

was a very swiftly flowing river nearby and they used to start off from there and dig their way across, scooping up the soil and passing the soil through rotating sieves and that sort of thing until they came to a large cylinder. By this time all the heavy dirt and the heavy boulders and stuff and a lot of the dirt had been removed so it’s getting down now to a

high concentration of gold in the soil. That’s when they used to introduce the mercury. And these were called, in the normal sense they’re called whiffle plates, but these were inside a cylinder so maybe you’d call them whiffle cylinders. I don’t know that that’s the right word. So if you knew where to go there was gold to be found. And initially,

of course, we didn’t have the faintest idea we were wasting our time sweeping the deck. Wherever you found a heap of dirt you’d go and dig it up and that sort of thing. As I said, where we went up the Wampit Valley to this other dredge which was much more remote we saw where these army blokes had beaten us to it. Now here again I don’t know that I would have head enough knowledge of dredges to have known where to go. The army blokes did and

this was the way, in the normal production of the gold on these dredges, this was the way they got the gold. They would run the dredge for a period of time and then they would stop it and they would pull the whiffle cylinders apart and get the gold out, the gold amalgam, and put it all back together and start up again. That was where the final product came out.

Yes. And, of course, I didn’t see much gold and I certainly didn’t get much gold on Bulolo. You could get a little bit, you’d get a few grams, I suppose, you’d call it, something like that, of gold. The biggest quantity I ever got was

on that dredge up at Wampit [Valley] where I’d got what these army blokes had left. They weren’t interested, well, there were four of us and we each got about four ounces of gold. So the army blokes weren’t the least bit interested in that because they had hundredweights of it, you imagine a heap, as I told you, of say 300 millimetres square by about half a metre high. I don’t know how they ever

carried it. Maybe they might have planted it in the bush somewhere and came back later for what they couldn’t carry.

Because they were there when we arrived. I’m talking about this last dredge. They were there and I saw the stack of stuff. And they had their rifles, as we did of

course, but we weren’t about to start a war with them over a bit of gold. As I said, they kindly left us about 20 ounces to share between the four of us. But the other dredges they had, I don’t know, I think they’d been stripped down. An interesting place, Bulolo. This is the reason why I call my

book Golden 306, 306 [being] the number of the radar station and gold because there was gold there.

Well, remember that this was an area that was peopled by tribes of these

natives, I don’t think there was much wildlife around. I don’t know that I ever saw wildlife. I have a photo and there’s a little bit of a story about some of my mates who went out pig shooting and they came back with a pig that they’d shot. At the time we thought, marvellous, but since then I’ve got to realise that that pig would have belong to one of the native tribes, I’m sure. But I don’t know if they were in

any situation to argue the point, but I would suspect that my mates had unwittingly stolen that pig. They shot it but it wasn’t a wild pig, I’m sure. The only wildlife, if you can call it that, that I ever saw were fireflies and they were

incredible. We had a big tree, whatever it was, an enormous big tree, somewhat reminiscent of the mango trees that I’ve seen in Queensland, but it wasn’t a mango tree because it never had mangos on it on the time that I was there. But of a night time this tree would start to twinkle with these numerous fireflies. And by, say, two or three o’clock in the morning

they would all have got into synchronism except for a few dullards that hadn’t got themselves sorted out. But that tree would be switching itself on and off at about that rate. Talk about a Christmas tree, it was incredible. And bats, there were bats there, not many but

I think all of those things would have been long since eaten out by the natives. Or alternatively if any wildlife had any sort of self preservation they would have gone somewhere else. Where they could have gone I don’t know but they certainly couldn’t have survived around Bulolo.

At Bulolo?

Providing our supplies kept coming through life wasn’t too bad. Fresh food was non-existent so all our food was canned. We were blessed with a cook, who became one of my dear friends, I might add, in years after the war, until he died, I don’t know, about

20, 25 years ago, Eric. Eric was a very conscientious fellow and he used to worry himself sick because he couldn’t make a nice meal with what he had to prepare the meals from, but he used to do his best. It was pretty hard tack [food or fare] but you get used to it after a while, I suppose. Well, when you know there’s no alternative.

Fresh fruit we saw occasionally because the natives had vegetable gardens and a lot of these were taken over by the ANGAU authorities and used as a food source for the troops. Not nearly enough, so it used to be shared around. I wonder if it really was. And occasionally we’d get a supply of

fresh vegetables, once every couple of months perhaps. We were somewhat fortunate in that where our radar had been set up was on the edge of a pineapple plantation, the pineapples had been cut off but the roots had been left in the ground. And I don’t know whether that’s the normal way that

they grow pineapples but the next crop that came up were tiny little pineapples about that big, certainly not a marketable size, but nevertheless they were welcome and we used to get into those. They may well have belonged to one of the native tribes, I don’t know, but at that time there was no native village near us and certainly not near that pineapple patch.

It was an area, I suppose there would have been three or four hundred pineapple plants there but you wouldn’t get much out of it, not enough to feed say 40 or 50 fellows on a radar station. So food was seldom in short supply at that place. I’ve been in places where it was in short supply but

it left a lot to be desired. Things like apples, never ever did I see one of them up there.

They were brought in, I don’t know, when we first went there we had to take our own supplies with us because you couldn’t be guaranteed that you

would be able to [be supplied] so we took enough to last about a week. But then we started to get supplies of food through an army group who handled all the food. We were somewhat at a disadvantage, because being such a small unit where a man was entitled to

so much sugar per week, which amount to perhaps half a cup of sugar a week, half a cup of tea leaves per week or something of that nature, multiply that by 50 [people] and sometimes it wouldn’t amount to a crate full, you know a package or box. And they wouldn’t, in those areas at that time, they wouldn’t give you half a box or say one and one-third of a box,

you got one box. Or if it happened to be something less than a box you’d get none until the next fortnight when you might be entitled to enough to amount to a box. So the result was that you would have no tea perhaps and a large amount of sugar. You can’t make a cup of tea. The next month you’ll get a large amount

of tea and no sugar, so that was frustrating but you had to live with that because of the fact that it was a ration per man and if you didn’t measure up you were stiffed. On the larger stations, of course, it wouldn’t matter because you’d be getting boxes and boxes of everything and it would average out, but on a small unit such as ours it didn’t average out at all.

Jam was another problem. You might get, say, two cases of plum jam and the next month or whatever it was you’d have no jam, but you might have whatever it was they called butter, which was a horrible taste. And so it went on and on and on. But most of it, all our stuff was tinned.

Milk, for instance, was powdered milk, powdered eggs, tins of fish. The episode that I recounted about eating the pilchards, the canned pilchards in the bottom of a trench at Port Moresby, was such that I could never bring myself to eat tinned fish for many years

after the war. I just couldn’t do it. Nowadays I enjoy it. But pilchards, these days you get a can of tuna perhaps and you get solid flesh, but pilchards is, I think, it’s what they scrape out of the insides of tuna and that becomes a pilchard.

Yes, well, chunks of something and you couldn’t identify what it was but when you’re hungry you’ll eat anything. I’ve got to say we were never very hungry, I suppose there were times, I was never hungry there but there were times up in the Kimberley area when they couldn’t get the supplies to us because of bad weather and things like that,

that you might miss a meal or two perhaps. I don’t recall ever missing a meal in New Guinea but sometimes you wished you did.

Yes, mosquitos, of course, in Papua New Guinea.

We used to take Atebrin [antimalarial drug] tablets. And Atebrin tablets are little yellow tablets and a highly concentrated colour, if you happened to leave one in your shirt pocket when you put it in the shirt to wash it your khaki would go a yellow khaki, and it happened frequently of course, inevitably. But the Atebrin tablets would not stop you from getting

malaria, it would hold it in abeyance until such time when you stopped taking Atebrin. So whilst we were always thrilled when we got posted home, and that took about 18 months, you had that fear in your mind that your Atebrin is going to stop and you know within about a fortnight you’re going to be as sick as a dog with malaria. So coming home

was not always a good thing. We always wanted to come home of course, and we always did, no one ever refused to go home, but you had that worry. I was fortunate because I’m still waiting after all these years and I still haven’t had malaria, but I don’t know that I did anything different to anybody else. I think I was subjected to the same chances as they were but all my mates, every single one of

them, anybody who was at Bulolo the time I was, there got malaria. Rats were another problem we had trouble with. Rats suddenly appeared. We had no problem with them initially but suddenly rats everywhere, bloody rats. And we devised all sorts of things to trap them.

We had cages that we’d entice them into and that sort of thing. But then the problem was what to do with them. You’ve got a wire about so big full of rats. Okay we’d open the door and we let them out and we stand there with mallets or sticks of woods or something. I think we were in more danger from the mallets than the rats were. Not one rat was

killed, they all escaped. So we thought, “That’s not the go”. So the next time we had a 44 gallon drum, a petrol drum, and cup the top out and filled it with water. And when we got the rats in the cage we opened the door and they jumped out and jumped into the water and then you could just knock them on the head while they were swimming around. I often thought the rats in the water showed characteristics not dissimilar to

many people in that they were quite prepared to stand on their neighbour’s head to get themselves out of the water, rather than be pushed under by his pal standing on his head. Don’t you see that in human beings? That’s a bit cynical perhaps.

I would say, except my mates, because I

always felt that I could put my life in their hands. And that was a good thing about wartime, you did depend upon your mates and you had to have faith in them. So perhaps I’m not being fair when I talk about the rats and human beings.

I don’t know that I was ever aware of it but it’s there and still is. It still is after all these years. I have a feeling for my mates which I think approaches the same sort of feeling that a man would have for his wife.

Mary and I have been married for 54, 55 years almost and we have a great rapport. I feel the same about my old air force mates, to [a] different degrees. The one who died a couple of years ago, the one who was our president, he and I worked Bulolo together and we found ourselves, even after I left

Bulolo I ran into him frequently from [Port] Moresby because he was doing a similar sort of thing to what I was doing and travelling around on maintenance. And that deep friendship has been there all that time and it’s a lovely thing which I have never ever found amongst any of my other friends. I have other friends from other fields of life, old work mates

when I was working at Dunlop and places like that, yes, there is friendship but nothing, nothing whatsoever like the friendship that is formed in wartime. I can’t answer your question. You don’t feel it happening, you don’t know when it starts, it is just there. I think it gets back to the fact that you’re in a war zone, you’re in a zone where you could wake up dead in the

morning and you have to depend on your mates. You have to depend upon the bloke that’s got guard duty who is going to let you know if anything is happening. It’s a very stressful time but no one ever talked about it. Talking about that theme, the stress, I’ve often told this

story. When you went to bed at night you got under your mosquito net and you were told you must take your rifle into bed with you. You don’t leave it propped up against that tent pole and you don’t put it under your little cot, you take it into bed with you. What they didn’t tell you was which way did you point it because, you know, the mosquito [net] hangs down from a

central point, do you point the shooting end down past your feet or past your ear? Which way are the Japs going to come in? You’d have no idea. That was a big worry. And we discussed this on occasions and no one ever had an answer for that because you didn’t know where they’d come from if they did come. You know, 21, 22 year olds faced with problems like this,

you’ve got to be dependent on your mates. In ordinary life, in civilian times, you don’t have to depend on anybody to that extent. So, yes, you loved your mate, there’s no doubt about it, in a real masculine sense of course. It was very important and I still feel

it.

I think that’s what it was, yes. I think you can summarise it this way. You can say your life depended upon your mate. Well, you thought it did and it may well have done had the Japs

attacked because when we were at Bulolo in the early stages there were Japs nearby. We knew there were but we had large numbers of Australian soldiers. We used to see patrols going out, they used to go up this little track past our radar station and go out into the jungle and they’d come back in two days time and on one occasion they came back carrying one of their

fellows who had been shot. Another occasion they came back carrying a fellow whom I had met [as a kid], I talked about my early childhood when we lived in Kensington, I didn’t mention [his] name. One of the fellows who lived over the road from me and went to the same school as I did, started at the same time, was a fellow called Jackie Quinn, and Jackie and I were great play mates as children.

He joined the army. The time came when an American aviator, a fighter pilot, had crashed, and I was an emergency first-aid fellow and I had a little bag and I’m running down this little track to where this plane had come down in the vain hope that I might be able to help him and this army bloke was running alongside me and he looked over to me and he said, “Aren’t you

Billy Ralph? Remember the name Billy? “Aren’t you Billy Ralph?” And I looked at him and I didn’t recognise him at all. It was Jackie Quinn. And here we are we’re 19, 20 year olds and we’d been five or six year olds when we’d first met. So the danger was there all the time at that time.

There were many plane crashes. The main problem was with this fighter pilot as the dredges progressed along the valley all the rocks were the first things to be removed and they were run up a conveyor belt at the back of the

dredge and dropped and it used to swing backwards and forwards. It used to swing backwards and forwards dropping these rocks out and then gradually move forward digging up more and dropping out the big boulders at the back. So this dredge had travelled perhaps a kilometre in this fashion and so from the air you could see the river and you could see this long stretch of

boulders and then you’d see the little grass airstrip. It is thought that the fellow had looked and seen what he thought was a beautiful, what he thought was a beautiful smooth bitumen or concrete airstrip and he’d tried to land on it. Except that it was corrugated, you know, the boulders had come out it would leave a big streak and it would move forward and come back so you’d have the peaks and the valleys in

something of the order of, say, two metres deep. And the poor fellow had come in and tried to land on that. His engine had failed and he had no alternative, he had no way out. And, of course, he ran into these rocks and killed himself. There was another occasion when a [B-24] Liberator crash-landed on our airstrip. This plane

had been in Papua New Guinea one week. It had been flown out from America the previous week as a brand new aeroplane. It had been shot up over Wewak [600km north of Bulolo] and they were losing height and they saw this airstrip, everywhere else was jungle, a hell of a place to land, and mountainous as well, and they saw this little airstrip and they didn’t know where they were so they decided they’d

have to land there. However, it was not big enough for their aircraft or maybe it didn’t have brakes, they certainly didn’t have engines or not enough engines to be able to stop. The pilot told the [other] fellows to jump out and I think I told you or mentioned how we went out looking for one of these fellows. Having got rid of most of his crew he then came round and he

crash-landed in the middle of our airstrip. This was a big disaster for us because at that time we were so very dependent upon the Douglas DC-2s I think they were at that time coming in with our supplies. The airstrip was barely long enough for them to land but with a big Liberator stuck in the middle of it, it was hopeless. So a decision was made to put a steel rope

around the fuselage of this beautiful new aeroplane and just rip it in half and pull it sideways. So we had that there too.

He survived but when he landed one of the blades of the propeller, it was a four-engine machine and it had a triple propeller, triple-blade propeller, one of the blades came off and came through the

cockpit and hit him in the side and he was a cot case [incapacitated or bedridden], I understand. But whether he survived or not I don’t know.

Can I talk to you about how I got back to Port Moresby because that’s an interesting story? That’s the Bulldog Road. At that time, when I was going back, that was eight months after we went to

Bulolo, there were hardly any aircraft coming in at all. And in the early days of being at Bulolo there was a lot of talk about this Bulldog Road, which the Royal Australian Engineers had constructed over that high mountain range which was at the northern ends of the Owen Stanley [Range], enormously high mountains .

The Americans, so the story was that we were talking about when we were in Bulolo, the Americans had said, “It is not possible to do it”, and they wouldn’t be involved. And, indeed, they were not involved. They had looked at it but they wouldn’t be involved, so the Royal Australian Engineers went on and they built that road. The fellow who was in, the

commanding officer of the unit that built it was a Lieutenant Colonel [William James] Reinhold and the road, the track, was called the Reinhold Highway. It was certainly a high road, very high in the mountains, but not a highway because it was a track in which a jeep could scramble through in four-wheel drive

towing a trailer behind it. That was the thing in which I came back and one of the most incredible experiences that I have had in my whole life. We started from Wau or Edie Creek, the little village of Edie Creek, and away we went on this road. We’d only gone a few kilometres when we were stopped by a landslide and then we had to take it in

turns to dig the earth away so we could get the jeep through. And we were told to stand out on an abutment of rock over this enormously deep valley below whilst somebody dug because we had had another landslide further behind us. So we were virtually trapped in between these two. While I was standing on this rock I hear aeroplanes and I look down

and you could see aeroplanes thousands of feet below you. An experience that I’ve never ever had in my life before, to look downwards and see aeroplanes flying. They are flying up this valley and through this gap which we talked about how we went up when I first went there, to Bulolo, and that was the situation. So an incredible bit of roadway. And so we went on and on until we got to ‘Centre Camp’ and then I

told you about the Kuka Kuka [the indigenous teacher] who came out of the bush. Then we went on by jeep to Bulldog camp and Bulldog is at the head of the Lakekamu River, and there they used to bring the barges up laden with stores and take them by jeep up to Wau, that was the way they were getting the supplies in. Then from Lakekamu you went down the river to the coast,

which was on the southern coast of Papua New Guinea and then about 1009 nautical miles down the coast to Port Moresby. It was an incredible, incredible journey and one of the magic moments in my life. Since then I’ve had some contact with several fellows in the Royal Australian Engineers who were involved in the building of that road and they put forward the

theory that that road, whilst it was initially built as a supply, an emergency supply road, it may also have been an emergency retreat road because if the Japanese had not been defeated at Wau, whilst they held that large air base at Lae which is only 70-odd kilometres away from Wau, we would never have got out of

there. So if things had gone in the wrong direction we could have been trapped there. And there were many thousands of Australian troops there. The Bulldog might well have been an emergency escape route, perhaps, perhaps, and you can speculate on this approaching the importance of Kokoda. But, fortunately, that didn’t eventuate, so that was an

incredible journey. Then to get back to your question when I got back to 41 (Radar) Wing in Port Moresby, they told me that I was to be engaged in maintenance duties travelling around all the various radar stations which had now been put in in places further north than what Bulolo had been. And I did

that for quite a while and, eventually, I was told I was to join a party which was going to put in a new radar station at a place called Long Island. Long Island is about 200 kilometres almost directly north of Finschhafen [350km north of Port Moresby]. And the idea was that they were going to put this radar station on Long Island, which is about 100

nautical miles almost due west of Great Britain [large island north-east of Finschhafen]. And the Americans were planning to land at the end of Great Britain, at that end of Great Britain, their policy was that they would not have an American marine landing without an Australian radar station giving radar warning, so that was to be our task. A hundred nautical miles is a perfect distance for one of

our little radar stations to be able to provide that cover. So we left from Finschhafen in five landing barges with another about five or so landing barges laden with American marines. And the idea was the American marines would land on the island, which was known to have had Japs there but they were not too sure whether they were still there.

We left Finschhafen on Christmas Day 1943, I suppose it was, Christmas Day, anyhow. So we arrive off Long Island the next morning before dawn and for some reason the skipper [captain] of the barge that I was on allowed his boat to drift in too close to the reef. I should add here that

Long Island is a volcano, not extinct. Since the war days there have been two, maybe three, eruptions. So it’s a cone sticking up out of the water with a lake inside and very deep water around it, but a coral reef. So we got in a bit too close. And I had been sleeping on a tarpaulin which covered all the radar

equipment that we had which was in this one barge along with another one of the radar mechanics, one of the station radar mechanics. Remember, I’m a visiting specialist going to help with the installation. And the first thing that I realise is that I’m washed overboard just before dawn in a reef with waves crashing over it

and I’m not a good swimmer. But it didn’t matter because you couldn’t swim. What happened, when I got out of the water, my chest and my back and my legs were just bleeding everywhere, I had scratches and cuts all over me and for many years those scars remained. You can’t see them now but they were there for quite a few years. So there I am in the water and daylight is coming, first

light, “What the bloody hell to do?” There could be Japs up there and if there are Japs there and whether or not there are Japs there, there are American marines behind coming in. I was in a hell of a state. I didn’t know what to do. And then I saw somebody walking along the beach and again I died of fright because I thought, “Well, who?” It turns out it’s the other radar mechanic, a bloke named Jim Minoro,

who subsequently became quite an eminent surgeon in London. And a few years ago, about 20 years ago, when I was in London I had planned to meet him but he had died three weeks previously, so that was unfortunate. However, I recognised Jim and I sang out to him and I said, “Jim, Jim, Jim”. He said “Yes”. I said, “What about the Japs?” “Bloody hell,” he said, “I didn’t think of them. I saw you getting washed overboard and then I

followed, I got washed overboard as well and I was looking for you”. So we didn’t know what the hell to do but we thought okay, he hasn’t seen any Japs we’ll get up into the jungle. But then what to do about the Americans when they landed? Anyhow, it was decided that it was too difficult for them to land over this coral reef and they decided to go further south, about five kilometres south. No beach in that area,

so it was extremely difficult to get from the place where we were to the place where the landing subsequently took place. It took us the best part of the rest of the day. So when we got to the area where they did land all the radar gear and everything has been unloaded from this barge in which it has been swamped for about six hours. High voltage electronic equipment and it’s been pickled in salt water for six hours.

When we got down there we found that there was what looked like a beautiful sandy road coming up from the water up in towards the centre of the island. A strange looking place but it was very convenient. So they unloaded there and took everything up this nice sandy road and stacked it in nice little heaps. Then we got the camp tents set up and everything like this.

The radar people were on the southern side of this road and the Americans were on the northern side. During the night it rained and rained and rained and then there was a strange noise like nothing you could imagine. With daylight we could see that this sandy road had become a raging torrent of water and subsequently we found that the lake in the

crater of the volcano, it was fed by mountains at the northern end of the island, the lake would be something like 10 kilometres in diameter and these mountains used to drain into the lake. So if it rained in that area it wouldn’t take very long before the lake would overflow down through this beautiful little road we had found and

that’s what had happened. Where is all our radar equipment? Out in the bloody sea again. It was dreadful, dreadful. Of course, the fellows, the radar mechanics on this station, there were four of them and one of them had had one month’s experience on a station in Australia and the rest of them were straight out of radar school.

They had no practical experience whatsoever. So there we are and we’re trying to wash the salt water out of our radar equipment using the waterfall from the overflow of the lake. And eventually we get it all up on to the top of the peak where we’re going to put it and there’s chaos. There’s smoke out of everything and chaos, chaos. So we had a dreadful time.

There had been but it turned out that somehow they had got the message and they had gone to the other side of the island, and then [they] had left the island and gone westward to the mainland of Papua New Guinea to Wewak, which at that time was [controlled by the] Japanese. So, no, there were no Japanese there. There was evidence of them, any amount of evidence where they had been.

Well, for instance, we finished up using some Japanese petrol when we ran low on petrol for our petrol electric sets generating the 240 volt power. Somebody found a Japanese flag. I saw no evidence of them but this is what I was told. We worked for days and days. For about three

days I reckon I worked there without sleep. And I’ve got these brand new rookies who were willing enough and keen enough to do what they could and only one bloke who had any experience. The bloke that had experience was a fellow named [Leading Aircraftman David Isaac] ‘Dave’ Blok and after about three days he got crook and he subsequently died with scrub typhus. And that’s a sad story, too.

But we got the thing switched on and smoke [came] out of everything and, of course, we’ve got no spare parts, that haven’t been picked either. So this was the problem. It took us about 10 days before we got the thing to stay on the air for about 10 minutes and then another couple of days later we were on the air for a couple of hours. We had to improve with our parts, with

short circuits and breakdowns and things like this. I had transformers sitting on matchboxes to try and keep them, a short circuit would develop internally to the metal case and then blow the fuses. But if that case was insulated from the main chassis, the main earth of the equipment, then of course there was no path to earth. So you depended on match boxes and it looked bloody dreadful, but eventually we got it working

and by that time we were about a fortnight behind. We missed our schedule, of course, but we got a signal from some high-ranking American officer complimenting us on what we had done. Three decorations have been issued to the people who were involved because all in all it was a fantastic effort. But if I may

diverge a little just about Dave Blok, it was a sad tale there. I always thought his name was B L O C K and in subsequent years I have been trying to locate him either on the Australian War Museum’s Web site or DVA’s [Department of Veterans’ Affairs] Web site and I can’t find him at all. Eventually, I was pottering around and I put in by accident

B L O K and left the ‘C’ out and up it came. And there is the whole story. I’ve got his name properly now. David Isaac Blok. So I looked up the White Pages [telephone directory] on the Internet for Sydney and I was able to locate about half a dozen people with that name, and I rang the first one and she said, “No, but I’m his aunty, talk to this number”. And it

turned out that it was Dave Blok’s brother. And Lionel, I think his name was, he had never ever received any information on Dave’s last few weeks, so I was able to give him a copy of my sequel to the book, which showed what Dave had done, and that fellow was so thrilled to get this information. But then on the other hand he gave me some

information. He gave me some copies of letters that he’d received following the death of his brother. He had a letter from an American clergyman. David Blok’s father was a clergyman, a Baptist, I think it was. And this fellow wrote this lovely letter saying how he’d visited David and David was making good progress and he thought that in a few days he would

be okay. In a few days he was dead. And the brother showed me all these letters that he had got from the Department of Air, etcetera, etcetera, and it was the saddest thing I have ever read in my life, to be able to read those sorts of things. The other interesting thing was there was not a mention of this death in the station record. The record that the commanding

officer is supposed to submit once a month, nothing at all about David Blok dying of scrub typhus. And yet two months later he records the fact that he had had to leave the island and go and get dental treatment. I was a bit unhappy about that. Anyhow, we got the station going and it stayed on the air. There were all sorts of difficulties but, eventually, after

some two months, we had a good run of about two months and then a brand new lot of equipment arrived and we were able to make the change over, but Long Island was quite an episode in my life.

Then I came back to Port Moresby. My reward, I suppose, was I was raised to the rank of

sergeant, which was nice. And it solved one of my problems, because to be a wandering maintenance technician you’d go out to a station as a corporal and you could arrive there and find that the head mechanic is a sergeant and he’s let his station run down a bit. And I’d have to come along and ginger [enliven] them up, and it’s very difficult for a corporal to ginger up a sergeant, I can tell you.

So when I was raised to that rank, that was a help. I continued going around to various places and there are all sorts of stories there.

That was when I came back to Australia, to Gabo. There was not much involved in that.

Gabo Island is right on the border between Victoria and New

South Wales. Right on Cape Howe. In fact, that’s where Gabo gets its name, from Cape Howe the way the natives pronounce it is Gabo.

No, I think it would be about, say, four, maybe, five kilometres in diameter, something like that. There was a lighthouse on there and still is, although I think it’s an automatic lighthouse now.

There was an unwritten rule, I wouldn’t call it a law, but a rule, that after you had done service up north or wherever you would get a posting in your home state. Victoria is a bit of a problem because during the

war we had a station at Cape Otway [200km south-west of Melbourne] and one at Essendon aerodrome [outer western suburb of Melbourne], because that was the only aerodrome in Melbourne at that time. Tullamarine [international airport] was not even a plan then. There was one [radar station] at Wilson’s Promontory [200km south-east of Melbourne] and another at Metung [230km east of Melbourne] and Gabo Island is just inside the border, it’s in Victoria, just south of the border, and so that’s where I was sent.

A hell of a place to spend your two months that you’re supposed to have.

It was more of the same of what I’d had up in the islands for 19 months, up in New Guinea, being way out in the wilderness on little islands where you couldn’t do much and all that sort of business, a big problem. But getting back to New Guinea, I

wandered around there for quite a while. Part of my job was to drag around seven boxes, heavy wooden boxes, which contained radar test equipment. And I’m doing this all on my own along with all my own equipment and my personal things. And I had been given, this goes back, before I went to Long Island I’d been given a Tommy gun, a Thomson

sub-machine gun, and that was lost at Long Island. All my equipment including my little breast pocket folding Kodak camera had been lost, I know exactly where they are, they’re about 60 fathoms [120 metres] down just off the beach, and that’s where my Tommy gun is. I subsequently had to, when I came back to Australia, I had to attend a court of

enquiry regarding the loss of an automatic sub-machine gun. And I was asked, “Do you know where this weapon is?” And I said, “Yes, sir, I do.” “Where?” I said, “It’s about 60 fathoms down,” and I was reprimanded for being frivolous. That’s where it is, it still is. Then I wandered around other places travelling

to all sorts of places around Papua New Guinea carrying these boxes. And, ultimately, I just got so worn out. I really was, I was dead tired. And the boxes were the killers. And I’d get back to Port Moresby to the 41 (Radar) Wing and you were supposed to be entitled to a couple of days, the next day was supposed to be a rest day and then the second day you were

supposed to be available for duty. Very often the day I got back was the day they’d send me out again and off I’d go again. There came a day when I was so tired that I got a message, as soon as I arrived back, I got a message to report to the radar officer, and I thought “The bastards, they’re going to do this again to me”. And I was really bloody annoyed, as much as a sergeant can be with an officer.

I said, “Look, I just can’t do it”. And I really was, I was completely worn out. I said, “Look, it’s those boxes”. He said, “Look, I’m sorry, I don’t have any option, you’ve got to go.” But he said, “I’ll send a general hand with you to help you”. And I said, “Okay, that’ll be a great help”. And it was. I had to go down to Milne Bay and then catch a boat from there northwards, north-west

up the coast of New Guinea to a place called Tufi [250km west of Port Moresby]. And when I got to Milne Bay the boat that was going to take me was delayed and so we had to wait. Normally, I would have stayed in a transit camp operated by the army but for some stupid reason I thought I’d go to the local radar station and spend a couple of days there. Now I, being a sergeant I was not obliged to be

involved in any duties, but this general hand that I had he was the lowest form of life in the air force and he got copped for duties. When the time came for me to leave I was told that this general hand was not going to accompany me, and even though I protested I was quickly put down, as you can be when you’re outranked. So here I am, I finish up carrying those rotten bloody boxes again.

Anyhow, I got to Tufi and found that their jeep had broken down and they were waiting on a spare part which hadn’t been put on that boat. So to get to the camp you had to go up a fjord about seven or eight kilometres and then come back again. The station was only about perhaps half a kilometre away from where we

landed, but there was no way you could land in the vicinity of the radar station. You had to go right up seven kilometres and come back and I got no jeep so I had to leave some of the boxes in the little enclosure that they had.

Yes, it was a bugger. Anyhow, soon after that I was posted home.

They reckon they’d get 18 months, well it was 12 months initially, actually, and then it was 18 and I finished up doing about 19 before I got posted home.

Yes, Gabo Island was my first place, two months there and then I came further up the south coast of New South Wales to a little place called Brogo [300km south of Sydney], which is

near Moruya, or south of Batemans Bay, in that area, and I spent a short time there. And then I was posted back up north again and came back to the embarkation depot, which was the Melbourne Cricket Ground, incidentally. There they said, “You’ve got to do this jungle training bit first”, and that’s why I went out to Wonga Park. And I enjoyed

that particularly with the Fitzroy uppercut, which was demonstrated there. But it was necessary because I had felt we had been tested. We had to have a mock attack up at Bulolo and it was said that we would be unable to defend ourselves. I had no argument with that, this was absolutely true, we were not combat troops.

If somebody was prepared to stand in front of you, you could stick a bayonet into him. But it doesn’t happen like that, or I imagine it doesn’t. This course in unarmed combat, I think, was the sort of thing that we should have had before we ever went to New Guinea, so I enjoyed that. And I went AWL every night there, too, I might add, from Wonga Park back to my home in Abbotsford. I had a lovely

time. What I used to do, to get to Wonga Park you had to come from Melbourne to Croydon by train and then you had a long stretch from Croydon to Wonga Park, about 10 kilometres by a little bus. There’s no way I could be on that bus because all the permanent staff at Wonga Park training camp

lived out and they were on the bus, so there was no way I could be on the bus. But I think I mentioned I’d been a very good amateur bike rider before the war, before I joined up, so I took my bike and I used to leave it at a little place over the road from the entrance to the camp and go out and ride to the railway station and take my bike home on the train. And it worked very well until this

day when something happened. The train was late or I was late, I don’t know what but I’m on the road and the bus passed me. So later that day the warrant officer who was in charge he sent out a message for me to come and see him in his office, and he said something like, “Oh, you’ve got a very nice bike, haven’t you?” “Bloody hell!” I thought, “I’m in for it here”.

He says, “Yes, I saw you. It’s a lovely bike”. And it was a good bike, too. We talked about bikes and bike racing and he said, “Now, about this business this morning,” he says, “don’t let it happen again. Make sure you are not late”. And that was all. And I continued going AWL until I finished it. I had a lovely time there. But it was

incredible because during the day you would carry on with all sorts of crazy activities like running over obstacle courses and climbing up trees and all sorts of things that you can imagine, unarmed combat and all these sorts of things, and then after all that was over, get on my bike and ride 16 kilometres, I think it was, to the railway station. I’d go home, go out to a dance that night and the next morning get on the bike, go to the railway

station, from Croydon back to the camp again on the bike and then have another day of very physical activities. It’s just amazing how fit you can be when you’re 23 or 24 years of age. Yes, Wonga Park was a great time. I loved it.

Gabo Island was just another radar station. Being a sergeant and hence the senior mechanic, I just had to be there to make sure all of the other mechanics, the junior mechanics, did their job properly. They all did their job properly so it was a breeze. But you couldn’t do anything. There was

nothing to see, nothing to do and nowhere to go. The big activity that happened there was we had three or four days, maybe a week, when the radar was absolutely useless and we couldn’t do anything about it because the screen was absolutely blanked out by echoes from mutton birds.

I’m just trying to remember what time of year. The mutton birds return to Australia in September and then they go up north again to the Bering Straits [between eastern Russia and the United States state of Alaska] in April, I think it is. So it was either September or April. I think it must have been September because I think they were flying south, which means they were returning to Philip Island. For miles in both directions,

no matter which way you looked, the screen was absolutely flooded with mutton birds, millions and millions of mutton birds. But then when I went to the next station, which was up past Moruya, that station was on stand-by so that was even worse. That was absolutely nothing to do. But from then on I got brought back and went up north up to

Darwin and from Darwin out to Sir Graham Moore Island [540km south-west of Darwin], which is just north of where they built an aerodrome, an airstrip, called Truscott. Truscott airstrip was named after a very famous Australian fighter pilot, a Spitfire pilot I think he was, who had an enviable

record in the war in England and wherever [Squadron Leader Keith ‘Bluey’ William Truscott, Distinguished Flying Cross plus Bar, recorded 11 enemy aircraft in action in England and the Pacific theatres while serving with Nos 452 and 76 Squadrons respectively]. And he killed himself from Truscott in flying too low and being, I suppose, too confident, but that’s how they’ve got to be I suppose [Squadron Leader Truscott was killed in a flying accident on 28 March 1943 when his Curtiss-Wright Kittyhawk crashed into Exmouth Gulf, 900km north of Perth]. So this place was called Truscott and I was on this little island, Sir Graham Moore Island. And the commanding officer there was an incredible bloke. He was a

Flight Lieutenant John Weir. And he was a fellow who threw the rule books away. Where almost every other officer I had met, you had to treat him like an officer, John Weir was a real character, he didn’t stand on ceremony at all, but he was a good commander, he could command when necessary. But at that place I had decided that I would build myself a radio

set. We didn’t have one, so I built this thing out of bits and pieces from the radar spares and made up bits and pieces. And I stole a tray out of the cook’s Coolgardie safe to make the chassis of it. They’re not like they are now, print circuit boards and things like that. And I got the radio finished but then it needed an antenna, again, the problem that I’d had in my youth. So I lived in a

hut, half of which was occupied by the commanding officer and the other half was occupied by the three sergeants that were there at the time. We were on the edge of the parade ground, which you barely called a parade ground, the other side of which had a flag pole, a proper flag pole. Now we didn’t even have a flag, in fact, there was no way you could have hoisted a flag

because there was no halyard, the halyard had long since gone. So, anyhow, I shinned up that pole and I was very good at that sort of climbing, I shinned up the pole and tied an antenna to the top of the pole and strung it across the parade ground to the corner of the hut where the sergeants and the officer lived. And everything worked beautifully. And, of course, John Weir, on the other side of the hut, divided by the thin wall, he could enjoy the radio as well.

Until one day he happened to notice this wire going across the parade ground and he said, “Oh, no, no, no.” He said, “You can’t do that. You’ll have to get it down.” He said, “Get it down”. So I said, “Okay”. And I tried to climb the pole and I get halfway up and “I’m sorry, John, I can’t go any further”. “Go on,” he says, “up you go”. “I’m sorry, I can’t”, liar that I am. So I slithered down and he said, “I’ll get the

bloody thing down”. So he tried to climb it and he gets up halfway and he really can’t go any further. And the whole camp was there clapping and cheering and having a marvellous time, and John was furious, “I’ll get it down. I’ll get it down”, he said. So he got a rope and tied a brick on the end of it and threw the brick over [the] wire and pulled it down and tied it to the back of the little jeep that we had there and

drove off. Well, it had to be wire or the post and the post broke in half. So I said to him, “John, that’s not a flag pole anymore is it? Therefore, you can’t complain if I put the aerial back up”. So it went back up again. But that was the sort of bloke John was.

Following on from the flag pole episode, John Weir decided to put on a parade and this was never ever done on a radar station. It was never known of before. And there was a lot of indignation about the idea of having a parade on a little radar station way out in the wilderness. The result of it all

was that there was chaos and pandemonium, because people had forgotten how to do a parade drill, but everybody enjoyed the fun. So the thought was that dear old John was a lot more cunning than we gave him credit for because he did enormous things for our morale. I don’t know whether he dreamed these things up or what, but it was a lot of fun and we enjoyed it. There was another episode,

on most radar stations there was a habit that when you picked up the phone to answer the phone someone would say, “It’s General Eisenhower here”. You’d always introduce yourself by using some famous person’s name or it could be one of the film stars or something like that. But because we were such a small unit your voice was instantly recognised

and no matter who it was they carried on with the little joke. We were strange people. Anyhow, there came the day when John picked up the phone and someone said, “It’s Wing Commander so-and-so here and I’m down at the landing area, will you send a jeep down to pick me up?” And John said, “I don’t give a bugger who you are. You get

back here the same bloody way you got down there.” And, of course, not realising that it really was a wing commander and he’s only a flight lieutenant. So, anyhow, it was all sorted out and I think the wing commander enjoyed the joke too. But that was John. Then after the war, many years after the war, I maintained a friendship with him but he moved up to

Mildura [north-western Victoria] and it came the time that I got a message that he was really ill. So I thought, “I’ve got to go and see him”, because they said he was dying. So I drove up to Mildura and went to his home and his wife took me to the hospital. And here is poor old John, he died the next day, and when I walked in he said, “Don’t you dare talk to me about that

bloody flag pole,” which was one of the lovely incidence that we had to remember. So he did die and I was privileged to speak the eulogy at his funeral, as I did with my other mate who died recently. Some friendships are just so precious and that’s where they come from.

That was at 317 on Sir Graham Moore Island. And at that time the end of the war had come, although I, no, I was there, no, I had been changed from there. The end of the war was impending and the air force had told me that I was to go down to the Loran [type of navigation aid] station on the other end of the island to learn the

operation of this equipment. And I can remember listening to the day that the Japanese surrendered and listening to all the festivities in Melbourne and I had a most unreasonable sense of anger, “Here am I, I’ve spent five years of my life in the wilderness fighting for Australia and here I am, I’m stuck here in the never-never [remote area] and all these

buggers down there are having a marvellous time and look at me, here”. I was cranky on it. Commonsense prevailed before long but just for the moment I had that sense. It was dreadful.

I think I must have, I had

already gone from the radar station down to the American camp. Most of the Americans had gone because they were anticipating peace and that’s why I had gone down there. Because I was so close, I was only 16 kilometres away, 16 miles, I had to be there and learn as much as I could before the Americans left. And then they were going to send further airmen, RAAF fellows,

whom I was to train. So I think it must have been when I was down at the Loran station when I heard the news of peace. I subsequently heard that there’d been almost a riot up at the radar station with John Weir in the middle of it all. In fact, they hosed John Weir and then upended him into a barrel of flour. Doing this to a flight lieutenant,

nowhere else could you have done that. But John was that sort of bloke, he would have loved it. I missed out on that. I’m down at this radar station and there were a few Americans left who were in no mood for celebration. They just wanted to be away. And I think I was about the only RAAF bloke there so there was no way I could celebrate in any sort of

form that you could recognise. So that’s where I spent the surrender of the Japanese, on that rotten little island. Some years later, well, when I say some years later, let me say it this way, about 15 years ago I had the pleasure of going back there. I went up to Kalumbaru, which is the mission that was bombed during the war, and

I had arranged, well, before we landed even, we got to Kununurra and booked an aeroplane, another fellow and myself, booked an aeroplane to fly us out to Kalumbaru, but on the way it was detoured to go to [Sir] Graham Moore Island. So we flew over the island and looked down and I could see so many of the places that I’d been so many years previously. And then we landed at

Kalumbaru and it was arranged that the chairman of the Aboriginal community, goodness, his name escapes me for the moment; he was going to take us, this other fellow and myself, out to this island in his boat. However, they had blown up the engine because they hadn’t realised that you have to put oil in it. So they had this lovely boat and this lovely

big 60 horsepower outboard engine but it had all seized up. They were waiting on a new engine and it was going to take a week. I’d hoped to be out of there in a week so I thought, “I’ll wait anyway, I’m this close and I’m not going to miss this chance”. I had to wait a week, which was nice because I got to meet a lot of the Aboriginal people and they were interesting, too. And, eventually, we got to go out to the island. The first place we called was to the

radar station and we landed at the landing where the wing commander had rung for help. And we went up there and the first place I found was the hut in which I had spent those few months of my life, and, of course, it’s inevitable that bushfires go through that area about every seven years, so in that time there would have been, about

50 years, there would have been seven bushfires so everything was destroyed and, of course, a lot of it had been destroyed in their celebrations of peace because they had burned that whole bloody place down. I found the hut that I’d lived in, the remains of it, and I found the hinge part of the fold-up wooden beds in about where my bed would have been. Of course, all of

these places are heritage places now and you’re not supposed to touch anything, but I’ve got to make a public confession now that I stole that hinge and I have it here because I reckon it was mine. Then we went down to the Loran station and came ashore there and the very first place we met was the American toilet. It was so difficult.

We couldn’t get to the camp because what looked from the air to be lovely smooth ground was indeed last year’s growth of grass, which was about chin high with the previous year’s unburned grass lying flat on top of it. So here you are, as you walk along, you only go a few metres and you’ve got a great big, like a

bale of hay wrapped around your neck so there was no way you could get through that so we decided to give it a miss. We found the place, they had a geo-physical, no, that’s not the name. The Loran Station being a precise navigational aid, they had to locate the place, be very, very

specific, to locate its longitude and latitude very, very carefully and an Australian survey group had done that. We found that and we tried for the distillation unit which produced all the fresh water for the Loran camp, which I’d done a fair bit of work on because when the Americans moved out everything was in a poor state of repair. And I’d had to

pull the, one of the motors had burned out on the distillation unit so I replaced it with a motor out of a water cooler system and that is still there. Unfortunately, we turned in at the first creek instead of the second so they had a bore there where they got the water from the bore, it was mostly salty water, of course, and

distilled it. So we couldn’t get to the camp. We came back to Les Brown, that was the Aboriginal chairman’s name, Les Brown, a big man. When we got there we found that they’d caught a turtle, a small turtle, which they’d cooked, so he invited us to join in the meal. So for the second time in my life I had a bit of turtle. The previous time had been at the radar station

when the missioners had come over from Kalumbaru. So I’m anxious to get home by this time because it’s late in the afternoon and we’ve got about 25 kilometres of sea to traverse. And it’s late in the afternoon and there’s a strong easterly blowing and we’ve got to go towards the east. However, we hadn’t gone, perhaps I suppose, it wouldn’t have been

more than five or 10 minutes and they spot another turtle. So the hunt is on. And we finished up, they got three turtles which they just bundled into the bottom of the boat, and I’m standing there and one of the turtles moved and slipped and jammed my foot in the bottom of the boat. The only way I could get my foot out, well, I couldn’t, I had to pull my foot out of the shoe. Anyway, here I am I’ve got one bare

foot and the other one is jammed underneath the turtle weighing, I don’t know, [200] or 300 pounds, I suppose. Anyway, we drove back in the boat in the darkness and I was absolutely terrified because I was thinking to myself, “How are we going to find our way back?” I’m saying, “This bloke, this is his backyard and he must know where he is”. I’m trying to convince myself. Evidently, he did

know because we got back right on the knocker and only hit one reef once. And we had no radio. Nobody knew where we were. We’d have been in a hell of a situation.

I have been to some on the mainland. A couple of months ago I went down to Wilson’s Promontory.

My radar association, one of our main activities is putting up bronze commemorative plaques at the sites of radar stations and we put up a very big plaque at Kalumbaru Mission which records the incredible contribution that that mission made to the Allied war effort, which nobody has known about and probably still don’t know about.

But anybody who goes to that mission, and it is accessible by road by four-wheel drive, can now read about on that bronze plaque the incredible work that they did. They rescued people and rescued aircraft. There were five aircraft that they rescued. Aircraft that would have been, when the king tides came, they would have been swamped. And they got those out. They rescued people.

Back before the war, in about 1932, there were two Germany aviators, and their name escapes me for the moment [Hans Bertram and Adolph Klausmann], and they had run out of petrol. They were coming from wherever [Timor] and they were coming towards Darwin and they got themselves lost and ran out of petrol and they crash-landed near the beach at Cape Bernier. They

were unable to send any sort of message. Their plane had sunk, of course, so they were virtually starving and they were found by one of the Aborigines who showed them how to go down to the beach and pick up cockleshells and things like this to survive, hopeless. And then they went back to Kalumbaru because they were in a pretty poor condition. So the

missioners rescued them for which the German government sent them a lovely pedal-operated organ in recognition of their efforts. They were involved in the rescue of 75 people from the steamship Koolama, which was bombed [by eight Japanese on 2 March 1942], also not far from Cape Bernier. It was

beached a little bit south of Cape Bernier and I can’t think of the name of the place. And then subsequently, after repairs, they were able to get it to Wyndham [250km south-east of Sir Graham Moore Island], where they unloaded a lot of the cargo, a lot of wool equipment and supplies, before it finally sank and became a nuisance. But the Koolama is still there underwater now.

So these missioners had done an incredible amount of work with the help of the natives from the mission. So we made this plaque which records all that and we’ve done that in quite a number of places all around Australia. That’s our activity apart from providing the reunion resources for our members, which we have twice a year, two reunions a year.

I didn’t leave Sir Graham Moore Island until about the 3rd or 4th of January 1946 because of bad weather.

I don’t recall how I got home from Darwin. But I went through the discharge process at Royal Park, which was an incredible experience because all you did was queue up and queue up everywhere you went. You’d find yourself on the end of a long queue about 100 metres long and you’d stand there.

And this was January so it was pretty hot weather. And you’d gradually move up and up and up until you got to the end of the queue and you’d go through the next stage, the next incredibly long process of being discharged, and that happened at Royal Park. I had also applied to start this engineering diploma

course at RMIT. To this end I had spent a lot of my time, all my spare time while I was travelling around New Guinea, in studying by correspondence, which was a big problem because to study by correspondence you are dependent upon the mail, and when you’re wandering around New Guinea, as I was, your mail would be accumulating back in Port Moresby. They couldn’t send it on to you because they didn’t know where you were. So I had

raised my level of education so that when I did the entrance examination for this diploma course I was successful. Unfortunately, the intake for that year had been filled and so they said, “Well, you’ll have to wait until next year”. And no matter how I argued there was no way I could get around that, so I had to wait 12 months

and so I thought, “Well, what I’ll do is I’ll go back to my old job”. I’ll be a bit vague here. I have to be a bit vague about the company name because what I’m going to say is not complimentary to them. When I had first started there the company was run by a dear old fellow who had taken over from his

father. The family had the tradition, I suppose, that the eldest was called, and I’ll select the name say ‘Jack’, that’s not the name, but Jack. ‘Old Jack’ was the fellow who had started the business, he was the grandfather,

and then the next bloke was ‘Young Jack’, and he was the bloke who had employed me when I had sought to transfer my indentures, my apprenticeship. Young Jack was a delightful old gentleman, but then there was the son, his son, who was called, really was called ‘Younger Jack’. So there was ‘[Old] Jack’, ‘Young Jack’, ‘Younger Jack’. Younger Jack had been

pottering around the company and upsetting the tradesmen when I first started there. When I got back there, Younger Jack is now the boss. And when I fronted up and said, “Look, I’m looking for my job back”, he was most abusive. He said, “You fellows, you think you can go away and have a great time and you can come back and just walk straight in”. I said, “You’re legally obliged to do it”. He said, “Yes, I know,” he says, “but I promise you this,” he says, “if you come back

here I’ll make your life hell”. So I was furious and I did my block. Bearing in my mind that I’m as fit as fit as a man can ever be, I grabbed him by his tie and I was going to whack him. I’m not an aggressive person by any means but I was so furious with this fellow. I pushed him and he fell down on the floor and he lay on the floor and he said, “I’ll have you

arrested”. I said, “You go ahead. We’ll talk about this in the police court and all the press”. Nothing happened, but I didn’t get my job back either. That was my introduction back to civil life, to civilian life. Not a good start. From then I went to another printing company, a place called Lamson Paragon. It used to be on The Boulevard in Richmond. And they were

absolutely delightful. They welcomed me. I had a problem too because I hadn’t finished my apprenticeship, I had something like three months to do of my apprenticeship so I went to the apprenticeship commission and said, “This is my problem. I’ve got to spend another three months”. And I had already enrolled to do this rehabilitation course so you couldn’t get the apprenticeship conditions, it was a conflict of all sorts of things there.

The man said, “No problem. You’ll have your journeymen, the papers, anyhow, within the week. Go and get your job”. So I worked at Lamson Paragon and it was just a beautiful place to work. I enjoyed that and I was sad to leave, but I had to leave. That was my introduction back to

civilian life. It was quite an experience.

Yes, of course, my mother was delighted. Well, I imagine she was, I don’t have any direct remembrance of that. It must have been good though. The biggest problem that had,

one day quite an attractive young woman came up to me and blew the hell out of me because she said, “You know me and you’ve walked right past me”. And I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know you”. She says, “Yes, you do. I’m so-and-so.”

“Bloody hell!” I thought to myself, “When I left you were so high and here you are”. I’m thinking to myself what a hell of a problem for a young male to have, there were so many young women of the day who had been children. My own wife, she’s quite a few years younger than me, so I dare say

at the time when I joined the air force she would have been in third or fourth grade, how could I know her? And yet, subsequently, I married her.

At a parish Sunday night dance. I’d had girlfriends, some girls, and one in particular who was so very,

very reliable. Mail is the most important thing in the life of a serviceman; you’ve got to have that contact with your home. Most of my teenage friends used to write me letters, but this particular girl she was just incredible, she used to write a beautiful letter. But, anyhow, when I came back, I’d have

married that girl but she didn’t want to marry me. But we’re still friends. I still meet her occasionally and Mary knows her, too, so there’s no problem there. That was the position anyhow. I met Mary, who was much younger than I was.

In the

hall at the Sunday night dance at the parish hall. I was a good dancer and I’m not modest about it, I’m not modest at all about the things that I’m good at. I’m a good dancer, so I could always rely on getting a dance at any dance, really, not the modern-day dancing but what was called modern dancing in those days

and old time dancing. So I went over and asked her for a dance and here I am now right from that first dance.

Yes, yes, and six kids and 19 grandchildren from one dance. You look at it like that don’t you?

Okay, this part, I think, is not disputed. This brand new aeroplane, one week previously had been flown out from America to Papua New Guinea and on its first bombing raid wherever, and Wewak sticks in my mind, it had been bombing over there and it had been shot up and badly

damaged. And some of the crew had been injured. And they had no hope of getting back to Port Moresby and, particularly, as they had this mountain range to cross. There was no way they were going to get past. And suddenly he sees this little tiny airstrip below him and he says, “That’s the place we’ve got to come in rather than try and land in the jungle”. But he said, “If we’re going to

crash-land I’d better get rid of most of the crew”. So he gave the order that when he did the first approach to the strip they were to bail out before he did a turn around to come back in and crash-land. They were supposed to land before at the beginning of the run along the airstrip. And this is how we got to hear him, this strange noise, this big bomber. We’d never seen the likes of it in our little airstrip.

So, unfortunately, the first bloke didn’t jump when he should have and he didn’t jump until the end of the airstrip, and then by that time when he jumped the wind that was blowing took them way out over the jungle and they were quite lost. And then the pilot came around and crash-landed. So that left

about five American airmen, some of whom had been badly injured, out in the bush. And search parties were organised. I had been on duty at the time, I was on duty and I heard this aircraft, which was an unusual sound, and I saw him do his first run across and come around, he went right over my head and around and I’d seen the fellows jumping.

And I took the bearings from where I was and where they were landing. You tend to do this and most people had done this so they knew where they were roughly. So this was in the morning and during that afternoon they had sent out search parties and they had found, I think, all but one. There was one fellow still remaining. And this bloke had been shot,

had been hit in the stomach with some sort of a bullet so we were told. The next morning, of course, I’m off duty now, and I’m a corporal, so I’m told “You’ll be in charge of this group that’s going out”, and there were several other groups too, of course. So we went out and, eventually, as I

remember it, and this is the conjectural point, we found him hanging up in a tree from his parachute. He’d been out all night and been bitten by mosquitos and God only knows what. He had a big hole in his stomach with what they call a shell dressing over it. This was about so in diameter and, say,

it would be about 120 millimetres in diameter and shell shaped and it had been put on his stomach and was held on with some sort of tape or something or other. The poor fellow was hanging up in a tree. And, of course, they thought they were landing in a Japanese occupied area. They really expected that they were going to meet Japanese and they were quite surprised, the fellows on the plane, to find that we

were Australian. But this poor fellow hanging up in the parachute he was prepared to shoot his way out and he was trying to get his revolver out of his pocket when we arrived. Anyhow, we got him down and started carrying him through the bush, through the swamps. We had this native

guide who had come along with us, the fellow who had no upper lip, it had been eaten away by some sort of cancer or something like that, otherwise a good looking bloke. And when the hard work of carrying him came this bloke disappeared and you can’t blame him for that I suppose. Our problem was compounded because one of our men got crook and

I finished up carrying his rifle and somebody else carried his backpack because we were prepared to sleep out. So we aimed in an easterly direction because we knew that from Bulolo centre there was a road running due north and we’d gone north-west from where we started to search. And I thought if we head due east we would

run into that road and then we wouldn’t have such a difficult job of carrying him. And that’s what happened. When we got to the road we had only been on the road about five minutes and along came a jeep. This road went out, I don’t know what it had done before the war, but at that time there was an army observation post out there and this jeep had come from there. So they

took this injured American and the sick RAAF bloke and whizzed them off to Bulolo. And I was hoping and praying that someone would come out and get us and nobody did. We were left for dead. So that’s the story as I remember it and that’s been debated. Another one of my friends

says that he did it and that I wasn’t with him and this bloke certainly wasn’t with me. So I have agreed to accept that on probabilities it is more likely that Ted’s version is more likely to be correct than mine is. But I still have that memory.

No, at that stage there was only

one. There were five that had bailed out and they had rescued four the previous day and there was only one]. I’ve checked that very carefully. There was only one. We’ll never know. We’ll never know. Ted and I have agreed to accept it. I don’t know whether I’m being gracious in saying that Ted is more likely to be right, I don’t know, he could be as wrong as I think I might be, but who will know.

It’s one of the problems with old history and I have seen this over and over again in the research which I have done for my book that old history is most unreliable. Not that people tell lies, and I want to emphasis that, people really believe as I really believe that I did that, but I have my doubts. But most people don’t have any doubts,

their beliefs are rock firm. But I’ve seen so many people get it wrong that I’m not prepared to be too certain of myself.

You didn’t have to pay anything. In fact, you got paid. I was paid three pounds ten [shillings] a week as a living allowance for the first three years. Yes, it was a gift. The first three years was a

gift. If it went beyond three years it was a loan which had to be repaid, ultimately. So we had to do an examination and there was something like, for this particular course that I wanted to do, which was communication engineering,

there was something like 300 applicants, and you had to do an examination. I’m coming in one year late and I’m coming in with a lot of what you might call civilian people, non war veterans.

So they had to do this examination and I think I had to do it as well, I’m not sure of that. But I had done all this study to bring me up to scratch during my sojourn around Papua New Guinea, which was really conducive to study because there was none of the distractions of the big bases in Port Moresby and places like that.

Anyhow, I did my four years and came out as a professional engineer, and I was born to be a professional engineer in electronics. I fell on my feet all because of the war. The war was a godsend to me. And I think that’s a dreadful thing to have to say when you think of all the people who paid the supreme penalty [death],

including my mate David Blok. But it was the makings of me. I’d have been some sort of a printer and not a happy printer, whereas I have enjoyed my entire professional life and I’ve often thought I would go to work without pay, but then I had a family to keep and I had to get paid.