Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in a place called Greta which is in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. Greta would be situated about thirty miles

from the major city of Newcastle which in those days had a population of around one hundred thousand people. It’s much more than that today of course. But Greta was only a small town. My father was a railwayman and my mother, prior to marriage, was a bank clerk. Her father was the local

policeman in Greta. I only lived there for a short period of time and we moved, the family moved, to a place in Merryville in a suburb of Newcastle shortly afterwards. I had two brothers.

Colin was the eldest, eighteen months older than I and my younger brother Noel was thirteen months. At the time of my brother’s birth my mother

gave me, I don’t know whether that’s the right word, to my aunt who was childless because rearing two young babies, I was a year and my eldest brother was a year and a half older, plus a new baby, was too much.

So I was placed in the care of my aunt who cared for me for a matter of two or three years. And as I said in my story I was only a very young child but on one visit to my mother I had said that, “Aunt Emma is my mummy and not you”. And that must have hurt my mother enormously because

shortly after that I was restored to the bosom of the family. The problem with that, and I’ve thought about it since, and that’s that the bonding process between my two brothers and I has never been very strong mainly because of that. I’ve lost contact virtually with my two brothers

now. One is even living in Brisbane and the other one still lives in Newcastle. That’s the early years. Would you like me to go on about what the conditions were like from first memory, the Depression years?

The Depression years were difficult. I think that’s probably an understatement because while my father was always in work, he had been a railwayman, the funds for

maintaining the staff on the railway were pretty difficult and he was reduced in pay to something like for every three weeks work he had he was only paid for two. So they cut the amount of pay which wasn’t a lot anyway. But we considered ourselves fortunate. But the other thing about that that the most difficult period in the early

1930s was that my father contracted a goitre which nearly killed him. He dropped in weight from twelve stone, a pretty robust twelve stone because he had been an athlete before that, to six stone. And his body, I can remember sitting on the edge of the chair and the

chair would be shaking like that because his heart was beating something like at one hundred and fifty to the minute as against a normal seventy or eighty. He tried everything to not go to hospital and have an operation. He tried all the quack medicines that were around. One of them was to boil cactus and drink the juice. A terrible

concoction but with my father that seemed the way to go. But eventually his health deteriorated to the point as I say he was down to six stone and he was very thin and his body was shaking and he eventually had to have the goitre cut out. He was in hospital for about six weeks. He had about two trips to hospital.

The goitre was entwined around his thyroid gland and they had to remove one gland and half of the other. So virtually from that time onwards he was virtually an invalid. He was on the way

up to be a stationmaster, he was working as a night officer all this time and his heart was strained and as I say he was virtually an invalid and he had to do clerical work. They couldn’t trust him because of his heart condition of being in charge of

a station where people’s lives could have been at stake if he’d made a mistake. But he survived, the family survived and in the context of all the people that were being put out of work and losing their jobs, not only losing their jobs but losing their homes but families being disbanded and all the cruel things that

happened during the Depression years we still considered ourselves fortunate. So that’s where we were as a family. Individually as a child at five years of age I attended the Torres Hill Public School and it was

situated in two buildings. One building for the infants and the other one for the other grades up to I think it was grade six or seven or something like that where at that level you were transferred to a

secondary high school. That was the early years. What we did for amusements in those days? Let’s see. There weren’t very many cars around. We played cricket in the street. We played a game called rounders and

it was something like hockey, we made our own rules. The rounders sticks we used were made of mangrove sticks. We used to go to the mangrove swamps which were situated a mile or two from where we lived and we

used to go into the mangrove swamps and cut the mangroves, the particular ones that suited the hockey shaped stick, and that’s where we got our material to play. All we needed then was a tennis ball and we were away. So really kids don’t need a lot of things to get

amused to play their games. I suppose that’s one of the things that gets me today the ability to invent things and to amuse yourself. One of the other things, we played football, we played cricket. Don Bradman was our hero in those

days. And football, we weren’t great followers of football but we played football too according to our own rules. And a fellow by the name of Wally Prig who was an international footballer from the Newcastle area took our attention.

We didn’t have any fishing lines but we used to go what we’d call flogging. And that was composed of a piece of fencing wire and we’d patrol the edges of Crowsbury Creek which was only a relatively short distance from us at the end of one of the streets running into the avenue where we lived. And we’d patrol the creek and we’d see any mullet that were swimming

along and hit it with a piece of wire and hopefully get a fish but I think we frightened more fish than we ever caught. Nevertheless, it was the effort that counted I suppose. We used to, as a group,

about half a dozen of us I suppose, would go walking a good distance. And one particular trip we took was to a place called Murdering Gully. Now that brings up exciting thoughts to any young child. I didn’t find out until later the real meaning of the term but I suspect that a murder had been

committed in this place and hence the name. The place itself was situated about ten miles away or something like that. And I can remember I wrote in the book about one particular trip we had. We had a dog, its name was Mong, and

Mong was, by the sound of his name, a mongrel really and a mixture of all breeds. However, he was a friendly dog and he was our pet and he came with us but he used to mark the trail or he did. He was very excited and he marked the trail all the way out at pretty well every post he could find. After we’d

finished our walk and swim out at Murdering Gully on the way back we seemed to have lost Mong. Anyway, we didn’t worry about him too much because we thought he’d find his way too home without any trouble and he did eventually about two hours after we got home. What else can I think about?

Yes. I started work as a telegraph messenger on the Newcastle Post. And after I’d been a telegraph messenger for about a year

I was transferred across to the telephone department where I worked as a telephonist. The outbreak of the war had just commenced and at that time I was still sixteen years of age on September 3 when the war started. However, I was seventeen shortly afterwards so I was very young.

While I was working as a telephonist at the telephone exchange Japan declared war on us. And one particular night the submarine attacked Newcastle and landed some shells close to the

Fort Scratchley and I could hear the shells passing overhead because they also shelled BHP [Broken Hill Proprietary]. Now that was the first real understanding that Australia really was at war. Although we had sent troops overseas it was the first real wake up call

and we knew then that we were in real and imminent danger from the Japanese. All the male telephonists, there were half a dozen of us, all joined up. I enlisted as air crew. The reason why I did that was it seemed an effective way of playing my part but furthermore a number of my

relatives had also done the same thing. There were two uncles and a cousin and a number of friends. However, that was in the January I signed up or enlisted but I wasn’t called until October. I was called up in October and

I was called up to train at Bradfield Park which is situated in Lindfield a suburb of Sydney, to go to an ITS, Initial Training School, where you learned the basics of air force life, that’s the

commencing part of it. I passed all of their physicals and some of their elementary teachings, mathematics, gunnery and all those other things. After about several weeks I was transferred down to an EFTS [Empire Flight Training Scheme], an elementary flying training school. That was at Temora in south western New South Wales.

I think Temora was chosen because the climate was perfect for flying. The air was pretty still in the early morning. I believe it had what they call a convection effect. The air below a certain height was very stable and it made flying very easy or less dangerous put it that way.

Those were the commencing years of it. I couldn’t land their planes or I think I would have given enough time but we were only given ten hours to do it. I don’t know what it was. They said I had an eye defect but I would wonder about that. There were a couple of fellows killed on the course and during the course of training I’d

only missed a tanker, a petrol tanker, by a matter of inches and a couple of the – or one of the trainees and his pilot were killed just a short time after I’d been there and maybe they didn’t want another one like that. I don’t

know the full motivation behind the reason why they didn’t persevere. I suppose if there’s a tendency to see a fellow not performing well the idea is to get rid of them and use him somewhere else and that’s really what happened. They asked me

then where I’d like to go and because I was in the post office and I had had a bit of knowledge about Morse I think that might have been the motivation behind going to a Morse school at Point Cook near Melbourne. The course took about six months to do.

It took that long to learn to be effective using Morse Code. That’s the start of it to that point.

Yes.

After completing the

course and judged to be proficient at sending and receiving Morse Code I went to a staging centre and very shortly afterwards was transferred to

Darwin to RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] Darwin and I worked as an operator straight away on sending and receiving messages. Initially it was RAAF Darwin although when I got to RAAF Darwin it was a bit of a sight because the place had been bombed rather badly. It didn’t stop the air force people working even

though the sides of the building had been blasted out and things like that. It didn’t stop us doing that. Initially as a new wireless operator I was given the job of receiving weather code messages. They were different, like anything that came through the air waves had

to be sent in code. You weren’t allowed to use plain language, that was a big no, no. The way the code came through was all in figures, figure cipher. A comparative five figures to each group and so on it continued like that. After receiving Morse

Code all night on the weather station which I was receiving messages on you’d get eight hours of that and then you’d come back and try to get some sleep. And at night time you could read the signals of the insects which were making the same sort of noise so you’d wonder about your

sanity after a while. I was there for only a fairly short time at RAAF Darwin probably because it was a learning period. They moved me from there to a place called Batchelor where Number 2 Squadron was situated. I was attached to No. 2 Squadron but for only a short period

and from there I moved to a place called Yirrkala which is in the Gove Peninsula. Gove was named after the Squadron Leader Gove who was in charge of the whole operation there and the name still sticks. It’s still known as Gove. I went back there years later

when I was doing an Aboriginal Tour and we were informing the Aborigines of their electoral rights. While it was known as Gove, the name of the township was called Nhulunbuy but Gove is as far as I know still in use today.

So I was there for about a year. It was pretty isolated. There were no females there it was a totally male situation. The sigs [signallers] hut was quite different. We were quite away from the main part of

the camp. On reflection I suppose the reason why was the sigs hut were where all the radio waves were emanating from and if you were planning to bomb some place you’d cross section where it met that’s where the signals were sent from it would be the

spot to hit. It was placed some distance away from the camp but I didn’t think about it at that time in that way. I suppose that’s very practical when you think of it. However, we didn’t get any air strikes or anything like that but I suppose as a general rule that’s what would have happened. It makes so much sense doesn’t it?

We were very quiet there for a year but it wasn’t quiet as far as the air force activity was concerned because there was a Catalina Squadron based about twenty miles from us and from there they had air strikes on places like Singapore and anywhere in that Indonesia archipelago.

There are so many places they could hit from there. You look at the map and it’s only a short distance. As a matter of fact Singapore is probably a lot close than Sydney or any of those places. It was certainly an important place. The construction at Yirrkala was principally for a

bomber base for Venturas, American Venturas. There were a lot of Americans in and around the Northern Territory at that time although I don’t recall seeing any in our camp at that time because the base was still being constructed or the strip was still being constructed.

After that I was sent down south on leave and while I was home I managed to get married. The war bride is in the front room there. I was given a month’s leave and then back to another transport depot to go on

to continue the war against Japan. The next thing that happened was that we were on our way to Moratai by troop ship from Brisbane. The troop ship (e UNCLEAR). It was foul underneath. Two or three thousand fellows, most of

them playing all kinds of gambling. I wasn’t averse to that. But I didn’t like the smelly atmosphere and I took my gear upstairs and slept on the deck and quite a number of us did the same thing. I think the trip took about, from Brisbane to Moratai, about eight to ten days or something like that.

I was on Moratai, I was there for quite a while, I don’t know for exactly how long. But while I was there that’s when the Americans dropped the bomb on Japan, the atom bomb, and that was the end of the war. And I put it in the book there that the thing I remember about the end of the war was

that a group of pilots who whilst still in the camp waiting for transfers further on blew up all the planes. It made quite a stick. I thought that was quite an appropriate way to end the war at any road. So they went me from there to a place called Tarakan which is off

the Borneo coast, an oil rich island. I wasn’t there all that long. A month or two I suspect, I don’t know. From there, eventually, home.

We came in

at Brisbane I think, yes Brisbane. The troop ship on the way to Tarakan I remember was the Kanimbla. Not the same ship of course, but that name is still on transport ships today. When we got to Brisbane

we were despatched by troop train to Sydney. However, the train had to go slowly through Newcastle and that was one less passenger on the way through. I managed to get off with my kit bag and got to see my wife who was pregnant by the way. And I had a very strong

desire to go home which I did. After a short time there, they didn’t seem all that concerned about Croft being missing, at least I wasn’t concerned about it but eventually I got back to the unit that I was supposed to go to which was at

one of the very nice suburbs in Sydney, Point Piper. And we were situated, quartered at a place, I’m not sure of the name but I do know that right below the building we were in was called the

Redleaf Swimming Pool. We were right on the harbour. After I’d been there only a short time, maybe three or four weeks, I was discharged. I couldn’t get home quick enough.

I’ll just have a drink of water first. This is all in the auto biography in much, much more detail than what I can recall now. But as far as I can recall

when I came out of the air force, when I was discharged, I returned home to my wife’s home and

before I was discharged we had a baby daughter and there she is up there, Noelene. And that happened on the 10th of January 1946. And then I went back to Sydney and got discharged and returned back to my in-law’s place where we

stayed for a short time. We were looking for a home. I mentioned an uncle who had joined up in the air force at the same time. He wasn’t that much older than I, about six or seven years or something like that. But this is how wheels within wheels,

houses were scarce, as you can imagine with all the military men returning home and all requiring homes and all that. The government at that time had allowed us a war service loan to purchase a home. However, I didn’t use that. This uncle of mine who was only a few years older, his parents owned a place

in Merewether, the suburb of Merewether where my in-laws had their home. The place they owned was only a short distance from it. The Jacksons was their name. They wanted to sell their place in Patrick Street and Sid Jackson told me that his

parents were thinking of selling their place in Merewether which fortunately was only a short distance away. And how fortuitously things happen. At that time I belonged to a building society called the The (Sta UNCLEAR)

and my father-in-law belongs to the (St UNCLEAR) building society as well. And the way the (St UNCLEAR) works is that everybody, the shareholders contribute and now and then well I don’t know what period, enough money becomes available from each shareholder contributing for them to allocate a

loan to one of the shareholders. So my father-in-law got a loan. He didn’t require it all it was a matter of seven hundred and fifty pounds. And I, being also a member of the same (St UNCLEAR) he said he’d transfer the unused

amount of money that had been allocated as a loan to him to me or to me and my wife and that was very good. I then had another source of money, rather than draw on the war service loan, which I used. I was able then to purchase this place in Patrick Street, Merewether

only a short distance away. I know that’s long and complicated but that’s how it worked out. We moved into this old place, it was fifty years old, and we had a lot of work to do on it and we had to paint it.

I remember years ago, we don’t realise how broad we are. We were out in Dalby and one of our English friends upset my wife. “You don’t talk well, we can’t understand you”. You said, “Well, we’ll bike a cike”.

That’s what it sounds like to me. Instead of that you should say, “I bake a cake”. How rude can you be? Mother still talks about that. We do have Strine, we do have our own accent. We are used to it and we don’t notice it exists. Sometimes you do get a bit of a shock particularly when tape recorders first came

out and we used to tape our voice. “Do I sound like that?” And yes, yes we do.

Of course we have, yes.

That could be a problem for somebody in the future that’s listening now because a lot of terms we use won’t be understandable in twenty, thirty or forty years time will they?

Foo was one.

No.

There was a cartoon and it was a straight line and there was this big nose over it and two eyes and that was Foo. And anything that happened Foo, got the blame for it, Foo was here or Foo was there, Foo did it. But I think that’s passed into obsoletion now. We’ve got a living language

haven’t we?

Yes. It went like that, yes. There are people that do studies on expressions or what is the original of them.

Now are we back on air?

Merewether, named after one of the prominent people in the Newcastle area, one of the pioneers. One of pioneers of that place, yes.

I was very young. It had no affect as far as I could see between the relationship

of my aunt and my mother, not that I could see. There certainly shouldn’t have been because Aunt was doing a favour in effect and quite a big one if you think about it to my mother. There was a bond between Aunt Emma and

myself. I never thought of it that way. I suppose children don’t but they did take my brothers and myself for a ride in their car. That doesn’t sound a big deal but we used to walk something like four miles on a Sunday morning

across to Aunt and Uncle Harry’s place for a ride in the car for a distance of fifteen, twenty miles and we did that several times. That would seem like a punishment to me now but maybe from Mum and Dad’s point of view, with three young active boys, it must have seemed to heaven to get ride of the three

boys for several hours. We didn’t think of it that way. A walk of four miles was nothing. A trip in the car, great. That’s the way we thought of it. No, Aunt Emma and Uncle Harry maintained a constant connection with the family,

so there was no antipathy with my mother. But from a mother’s point of view it must have hurt. It did affect me as a young child, yes.

and that was a cry from my heart, “You’re not my mummy, Aunt Emma’s my mummy”. And it did have consequences later on. I see the consequences in the relationship between my brothers and I. It’s never been mentioned before and never been spoken about but that’s only the reflection I have on it. As I say, I lost contact with my

brothers but I’ll give you more detail about that later on about what happened to them. If you want I’ll speak about that now if you like or is that a bit out of context?

No it seemed to fit in with the family because my mother loved me dearly. I’ve never, ever questioned that, never, in my mind except that outburst as a child and why that’s still there I don’t know. You’d need to be a pretty good psychologist to work out why a child makes statements like that but it’s not made idly I wouldn’t think would you?

Oh yes. They had an Overland, a 1925 Overland. I’ve got a picture of it a matter of fact. Just behind you in the cabinet there, there’s a picture of my grandmother, Grandmother Croft, and that’s taken from

a picture of the Overland car and me sitting at the wheel. Uncle Harry, a spritely gentleman of thirty or forty years with his foot on the running board and behind the car itself, looking over the bonnet, there’s my Grandma Croft. There she is there and I’ve picked it out

with my computer which has a scanner and enlarged it and there it is. It’s a lovely picture of the old lady. Yes, I remember the Overland, yes.

Children don’t notice a lot of things. I would say we were living in poverty particularly in relationship to today. I didn’t wear shoes for instance. I didn’t notice it, I didn’t miss them.

I’ve got memories of the shanty towns that people lived in. I’ve still got memories of them. There was a rather large one, there were several of them, but there was a rather large one at a place called Nobby’s in Newcastle. I don’t know if you know it at all?

Nobby’s. As you approach Newcastle Harbour itself, there is a cliff that’s called Nobby’s but just behind that there was a rather large allotment of ground not being used by anybody. And in those days the shanty town was

situated there, people went there to live. And it was horrible. Even as a child I recognised that the place was made of cardboard and corrugated iron, anything to keep out the weather. But that’s what protected them from the weather and they had to live somewhere and that’s where they lived.

This is one of my wife’s relatives, and he suffered during the Depression years, he was a digger and he took his wife and his children to live in a place in the

forty

property, he lived in a tent, did help a lot of people like that. That was one side of it a direct side of the family, I didn’t find out until later on of course, until we were married, that he lived in that situation. And in a way it says something about the government of the day and how they treated their ex

servicemen. On the other hand I don’t know the politics of it. I don’t know what a government does when twenty five percent of the population are out of work. What do they do? So it’s hard to make judgements all I could see was the end result. I did know of people that had lost their homes.

I did know of people that had lost their jobs. There was one particular member of the family, of the larger family, one of Mum’s aunts, her husband was fifty years of age and got thrown out of work because of the Depression and never ever went back to work. But at fifty years of

age, by the time the Depression was over he was nearly sixty, and there was no job left for you. I think we saw something like that a few years ago when at even forty years of age today wasn’t good enough. You weren’t going to get a job at forty. I think even now fifty year olds have problems trying to get a job.

Yes. The effect of the Depression on me as a child, well, we were pretty well insulated, Mum and Dad, although as I say they both went through a horrible time with Dad’s sickness. It was nearly killing them. I suppose the real fear from their point of view, particularly my

mother, was that she was going to be left a widow with three young children to rear. And that must have been something that caused her a lot of sleepless nights I would think. As a ten or twelve year old, things are simple. We played our games. We got our education.

We always had a roof over our head and always had clothes to wear and always had food to eat. I suppose when you get right down to basics, even in the Depression era, if that’s being provided for you, you are pretty well insulated from the misery of others. We’d heard

of people having to live home and go away and a lot of horrible things happened, people losing their homes and having to go out. No, not a direct affect because of my father holding on to his job but, yes, it was there.

Even as a ten to twelve year old the effect of the Depression was there. I suspect that it caused a lot of insecurity and maybe in some sense the enlistment of a lot of fellows that were several years older than me. It was quite understandable as a motivating

reason to join up. I know patriotism was there, they wanted to protect their country and their loved ones, yes, and that’s there always but there are other factors and that surely must have been one of them.

You’ve only got to look into mother’s cupboard. You know, when you go out there have a look in her cupboard. I suppose it’s something to do with that. I carry several hundred dollars with me all the time. I don’t

need it. I’ve got a card I can use. My children never use it. They use the plastic cards. It is something to do with security I’m sure of that and maybe I can trace it back to that period, the insecurity of people. I don’t

lie awake at night worrying about money. I don’t. So maybe I’ve got out of that part of it I don’t know. I would think that if people were insecure as children and some of them were of my age group that would explain a lot of things to you, if you could understand what it was like. I don’t know

how you could unless you’ve been through it. Maybe periods of adversity are good for the soul.

You can relate to that can’t you?

No, she was a rotten cook. My wife would be the first to admit that. My wife is a lovely cook, she’s a great cook. But no, she couldn’t cook. She just about ruined my digestion.

When I was working in the post office in my first job I was working night work a lot, she’d cook me a steak for breakfast. She’d put it in a pan and throw some fat on it and boil it away and that would be my steak. I’d eat that and then I’d go and sleep for several hours. But I’ve got an idea that

had something to do with my rotten digestion now. She was adequate, she cooked for us.

I was aware of it. I was aware of it very early in the piece particularly Aunt Emma took me along to

several Anzac [Australia and New Zealand Army Corps]Day ceremonies. Part of the reason why was I suspect, this belongs to the particular era too - that nearly every family in those days of the First World War had lost a relative, son, a brother,

a father and in the Croft family side Dad’s brother George had been killed in a place called Fromelles in France. As a matter of fact my daughter dug that out, out of the computer, from the

web and it was one of her intentions next year of going over to the war cemetery in Fromelles and looking at, it would be her great uncle, where he’s buried. It goes back to the children too doesn’t it? There are connections and I think

probably more so today than ever because we’ve got the means and the ability to go and see these places. I think that’s in a lot of families now. She’s also going to the Anzac Day ceremony, that’s the plan.

Yes. She’s doing that trip and then going

over to France to the war cemetery over there. I don’t think that story is unusual. I think if you were to quiz a lot of the younger people at Gallipoli that would be the situation that one of their relatives had been killed in places like that.

I suppose that’s what it is isn’t it?

It was a bit of a mixture. My parents weren’t overtly religious but as a matter of fact this is one of the things I write about every now and again. I’ve put down, what do they call it? Meditations. There’s one particular one I can remember and I’ve written about it just lately

that two doors away from my home was a bakery and directly opposite that was an old time Presbyterian church. I don’t know whether the connection with my mother was Presbyterian, I don’t think so, I think she was Anglican, but certainly she had Scottish forebears so maybe.

At a very early age we were sent as young children across to this Sunday School at this little old Presbyterian church and we stayed there for quite a while. We had some good times with Sunday School picnics and things like that. That was a very early connection with the church. Later on

when I was about ten or twelve, I don’t know what really caused it but we went to an Anglican church, St. Mark’s Anglican church and I joined the cubs.

From there I left that Presbyterian church and I became a, what is it? When you become a confirmed Anglican you are able to take the Lord’s supper, that’s the way it works,

communion they call it. So that’s where I was at the beginning of the war. I had become a church going Anglican. The depth of faith wasn’t really deep but I was comfortable with it

and that’s where I started out. Afterwards, on a question of faith, after our first child was born, Noelene, we had a second one and that was one of the sad times in my life, we had a blue baby. And she only lived for four days. A sad period.

That’s fifty years ago.

She’d be more than that. Imagine getting emotional after all these years.

Yes.

Lyndell.

Anyway. That turned us both around. And I thought because the connection with – we were married in an Anglican church but I joined the Methodist church. When I came back from the war

I joined the Methodist church and it happened through this. The Methodist minister, Mr Fullerton, Reverend Fullerton, I sought solace there and that’s where I found God at the same time and I’ve always belonged to the church ever since.

No, the Uniting Church, the UC.

Yes.

Well Joan was a Methodist and I was virtually a nominal Anglican. I think deep down there’s always been some search for religion there, yes, I think that’s always been

there somehow. I don’t know how deep. Sometimes it’s pretty shallow. But in just the last few years I’ve been writing a lot about those experiences. I even wrote about the death of Lyndell. I called her a visitor from God, I write a bit of stuff like that. Incidentally that’s on a tape as well.

There’s one of the books in there, it’s sixty odd pages or something. And I make the books up and I take them to my church here and drop it on the table where they keep stuff like that and people will take it and read it. I don’t know what’s going to happen there but it’s my way of expressing my belief.

Yes. Very much so, yes.

Yes.

Yes.

That’s another subject, choice. Coming back to religion, yes, in the early days when I was going to state school it was fairly common in those days, there was a fair bit of bigotry, that’s the only way I can describe it. And near our state school there was a Catholic School, well children,

Catholics and Protestants and so on. But we used to get a lot of that bigotry from our parents. You see, how can I say it? My grandfather who I didn’t know very much about him came from Ulster. I suspect you can trace a lot of the bigotry coming from that strife that’s still there. Thankfully today a lot of that stuff has disappeared but

even when I came back after the war there was still bigotry there. It’s in Joan’s family to a large extent. Some of my Catholic friends I think they suffer from the same kind of thing only on their side. It’s un-Australian and maybe I suspect one of the good things that came out of the war years was this distaste of bigotry

because I don’t notice it around too much these days. Some of my best friends are Catholics anyway.

It’s fed to you from a child. I got repelled some time ago when

I saw some Catholic children being escorted by their parents to their Catholic school through a Protestant area and the hatred that those Protestants had for those little kids, they were only about that high, two, three and four year olds, was disgusting. I suspect it’s on both sides, I don’t know, but it’s been going far too long and it’s about time they woke up. And

certainly we don’t want it over here ever.

My grandfather on my father’s side died in 1904 at forty years of age. So that side of it I know. The

other one died when I was five or six or something like that. And I only have one memory of him, he was a huge man, for a five year old he filled a doorway, he’d be something like twenty or thirty stone. I don’t know. What does an adult appeared to a five year old? They all appear as giants don’t they? He was a vert large man, he was a policeman, and an Irish policeman so I don’t know.

No, not at all. Grandmothers, Grandma McRae probably was the one that had the most effect. The other grandma died pretty early in the piece and as I say I recovered that picture there. But the other one was a dear old soul and all I can remember was she was a beautiful old lady with snowy white hair.

She was gorgeous. I loved her, but no I don’t know whether there was any direct influence. Probably the reason for that is that at the beginning of the Depression years Grandma McRae, that’s Mum’s mother, and my Aunt Nance came to live with us in our three bedroom

home and I was forced to live out on the front veranda, no bigger than that one there, and that was my bedroom. I didn’t have any study facilities or anything the place was so crowded. So I missed out on all that opportunity to get a good education but even so I still went to the top high school in Newcastle so I must have had some innate intelligence. I don’t know but it got me through to that

stage. But I wasn’t motivated at all to study or do anything like that partly because I suspect the Depression years and the main object in those days was to get any job, anything.

Well it’s the equivalent of a scholarship. It’s called the Intermediate in New South Wales. It was after three years at

high school. I can remember some of my marks there were atrocious. I think I got six for Latin and about ten for French out of one hundred, terrible.

It didn’t seem necessary. I must have retained some because it helped me to understand. I didn’t understand it at that time,

but French and Latin are so constructive in a lot of our English worlds so if you can understand those pretty well you can understand your own language and what it means. Maybe I’ve moved on since then, I don’t know, but I haven’t done any direct study since then. Education doesn’t stop

when you’ve left school does it? Sometimes it’s just the beginning.

I liked history and still do. That’s what I watch on TV quite a lot. We’ve got Foxtel here. I watch that quite a lot. It’s amazing how much information you can get from a television set

about all the things that happened in bygone years. I suspect maybe a lot of the stuff that we do get from television now is far more accurate than we were ever taught in school. Some of the things I suspect we were taught in school were quite inadequate and quite inaccurate as well. I know wen I was growing up a lot of it was slanted

towards the English version of right and wrong. I think we view with suspicion a lot of the stuff that was put out. And sometimes, well, you can’t make judgements in 2004 about behaviour in the year 1780 and you’d be quite wrong to do it.

You can’t – present generations can’t make very sound judgements on past generations.

It was a town that was largely dependent on the Broken Hill Proprietary

Steel Works. It was virtually a city that depended on BHP. It was thought by the manager of the Broken Hill Company

that it was better to bring the iron ore to Newcastle to smelt it because the reserves of coal in the Hunter Valley were enormous. I don’t know what the ratio of coal to iron in tonnage terms would be. Certainly it would take a lot more coal to

produce a tonne of steel than it would in the reverse. So that, as I understood it, was the economic rationale for the steel works being where they were. I can remember

queues of steel workers riding their bikes around the four o clock shift along the main road going through the suburb, it was Islington adjoining the Merewether one where I lived. Some of those queues went for

fifteen, twenty minutes, eight or ten abreast, cyclists. Of course that was before the usage of cars was common. Pretty well everybody had some connection with it. For instance, my father who I mentioned earlier, couldn’t continue as a railwayman

was a clerk in the Port Waratah Office of the Railway Department where they worked out the rates of cartage of coal and steel, or mainly coal it would have been in those days, to the steel works. That was his job. He was compiling the

accounts for the Railway department to BHP for the cost of transport for coal and so on. So just in that one area alone there were a lot of ancillary affects. There were a number of other subsidiary firms. For

instance, my eldest brother became an electrician at Commonwealth Steel Company in a suburb called Mayfield. And that was there because of the ready access to steel coming from BHP.

BHP had a big affect on the city of Newcastle but it wasn’t the only affect. It had a number of other reasons for being there because it was a large port. Also it was virtually at the end of the Hunter Valley and one of the most, if not the most

fertile valleys in Australia. The Hunter Valley goes for the distance of about one hundred miles, as far back as Scone, and it’s quite wide but I wouldn’t know the exact distance in width but it would probably be twenty or thirty miles wide. I need to be corrected on the dimensions of that but it’s quite a

large valley. And of course the valley supplied a lot of produce which was taken up by Newcastle and I suspect went further afield. But also in the valley were the coal centres the places like Cessnock and Kurri Kurri,

a range of places like that where the coal seams were. In fact Newcastle can trace its beginnings right back to the start of the state of New South Wales because if you were at sea and you passed Newcastle you could see seams of

coal in the Merewether. There’s a Merewether seam. Joan’s grandfather worked at the Merewether pit it was called. And that seam I believe went out to sea. So, you know, coal and Newcastle go together but also a very large

port and the use of that. But the history of Newcastle goes back to 1797 I think. It’s got a long history. A lot of people used to turn up their nose about Newcastle, “Smelly old Newcastle, a coalie town” and things like that. You don’t say that too often to Newcastle people, or Novacastrians as we’re known by.

I always found it a friendly town. They were pretty tough on their footballers though because football was one of the main sports and Newcastle used to produce a lot of fine footballers. They still do for that matter and cricketers for that

matter. So, you know, the sporting elite of Newcastle are quite famous some of them. The education facilities are wonderful. They’ve got a university there and so on and they’ve got a major hospital. Joan and I are out of touch with a

lot of it because for more than fifty years we’ve been living here in Brisbane although over that fifty years we’ve spent a lot of time going back to the wider family. We have quite a connection there at Stockton, we’ve got quite a number of relatives there.

Yes. A sign of the times was when I left school I sat for an examination, now that would

be 1938, an examination for a telegraph messenger. Now a telegraph messenger is, I wouldn’t say one of the lowest forms of life but it’s the beginning isn’t it? To sit for that examination there were three hundred boys around fifteen years of age. Six of

us passed the exam, not passed, but six of us topped the exam, all to get a simple job like that which certainly wasn’t highly paid. I started off on fifty four pounds a year. I was the wealth one in the family my brother started off on fourteen and sixpence a week.

But it gives you an indication of how jobs were, how hard it was to get them. To simply just carry a telegram from the telegraph office to its destination doesn’t require knowing how to spell and how to add up. It doesn’t require any of that. All it needs is strong

legs and to be able to avoid being run over by a car which incidentally happened to me once. I got run over by a car in Hunter Street, the main road. A doctor opened the door of his car and I was going down and there was a tram one side, a car, and me going down there. And I hit the door of the car and went under another car.

No. It just ran over my leg that was all. I was

lucky. Either that or I’ve got strong bones. It must be strong bones.

That’s happened to me twice as a matter of fact.

Fairly simple stuff.

I can’t remember exactly but it required a knowledge of mathematics and a knowledge of English. The test wasn’t difficult as far as I was concerned. But don’t forget that they were fifteen year old boys and I had been fortunate enough to go to a high school. I don’t know whether that made any difference because I still reckon I wasn’t a very good

student. But, yes, what happened? What was the process? The post office I worked at was the Newcastle Post Office. I don’t think it has changed over the years. It would be a heritage place at any rate if it has. It was rather a nice building. From what I remember it was made of sandstone.

The main section of it facing Hunter Street, the main street, had columns of fifteen or twenty feet high. I don’t know how round they would be, somewhere in that range. The colonnade used to go around into the

side street which was called Bolton Street. The telegraph room was situated down stairs I think. At any rate, the telegram was received by teleprinter, that’s what they used in those days. And there

were two ways of getting it by teleprinter and also by phonogram. It went to the desk and the fellow running that was called the indoor messenger which I, because of my seniority, was appointed to almost immediately. An indoor messenger would get the telegram and

slip it into a window faced envelope and call out one of the telegraph messengers that was sitting down on his backside and wasn’t do anything. And he would be handed that, or one or two or three depending on how many you’d received. And he’d be booked out to deliver a telegram to wherever and he’d only be allotted a certain amount of time to deliver it

and that would all be recorded. If he was late he was in trouble. He had to be back on time. So you couldn’t go out and have a couple of drinks or if you had any drinks you had to be quick about it because the indoor messenger knew how long it would take to deliver. So that was done. Newcastle had a very hilly section there and

it wasn’t uncommon to get telegrams that went up to The Hill as it was called. Of course the temptation is that once you got out there you could look out to sea and have a bit of a spell because it was hard pushing a post office bike all the way up a steep hill. Mind you, coming back was pretty quick too because you didn’t have to peddle you just went “whooooosh” down on those heavy PO [post office] bikes. I don’t know

whether any exist now. They’d be historical machines now. Yes, telegraph messengers.

The

other one came through the teleprinter.

I don’t know if I can go into too much detail about the teleprinter but with the phonogram there were a number of lady telephonists, phonogram operators they called them. I’ve got an

idea that was mainly for the local traffic. Anybody within a certain range of the phone phoned it through to the telegraph office. It might well have been a birthday or a wedding or something like that and

particularly around Christmas time was a very busy time with telegrams because there were all these Christmas greetings. We didn’t have Christmas cards as such that I can remember but we did have these specially prepared telegrams, prettied up a bit, saying “Happy Christmas”, or “Happy Birthday” or whatever. It was quite a

trade. As I say, Christmas time was particularly busy and we never stopped delivering telegrams. And of course there were always the business ones. That was a thing that belonged to that era but of course it’s disappeared now I would think. Now you have

your emails and all the rest of the stuff we have these days.

Well, they were stationed pretty well at every post office. They each had a telegraph messenger. I think Newcastle had bout six or ten or something like that because, you know it was

quite a business centre and there were quite a number of business telegrams sent. That’s what I can remember about it.

When I went into the telephone

exchange, I’ve got a figure there, I don’t know where I got it from but I think it’s fairly accurate, there were two thousand one hundred subscribers in the main telephone department of the Newcastle centre. However, there were other suburbs with their own post office with their own telephone connections so Newcastle

mainly covered the business area. For instance where my wife Joan used to work, she used to work at the Hamilton Post Office, and they had their own telephonists there. Incidentally, that’s where it all started with my wife and I. It all had to do with telephones didn’t it?

Did we? No, I don’t think so. I was still working in the telephone department and it started with a Postal Institute picnic and me and my mate,

Toby Thomas, who was also a racing cyclist, he also was a telephonist but he and I used to race cycles in those days. We belonged to a bike club and we decided to go to this Postal Institute Picnic at a place called Nelson Bay.

Port Stephens is part of Nelson Bay and Port Stephens is situated in kilometres, I can’t translate it, it would be about fifty kilometres north of Newcastle. It could have been, well it was used during the war it was a centre for shipping of some description. I’ve got an idea that the navy might have had something to do with

that although I’m not sure of that. It certainly had good facilities there for large ships. It was a beautiful place and largely unspoiled and Nelson Bay was the large town situated on the bay but it was more of a resort for

holiday makers. Therefore it was a pretty good, clean and lovely place for a picnic. And that’s where we went to have our picnic. And we had everything there. We had races and food and things like that, what people used to do on picnics in those days. And on the way back that’s when I first really met Joan.

On the way back the bus was rather crowded and the boys were sitting down and the girls sat on the boys’ knees. And guess who saw on my knee? My future wife. I asked her out to go to the pictures and well things happened from thereon in and the end result was eventually

we got married some years later, that was towards the end of the war. That’s what the post office was like. I spent some time as a telephonist. It was thought that

girls couldn’t work, it wasn’t nice for them to work, all night, but young boys could. I couldn’t follow that logic but that’s what happened. So they kept, I don’t know how many exactly but half a dozen of us. We were in the eighteen, nineteen, twenty age group and

we virtually worked one week dog watch and one week day shift. On the day shift we worked as a normal telephonist doing what telephonists do.

Well if you can imagine

a large switchboard duplicated twenty or thirty times in a long row of switchboards and each switchboard had the ability to answer two thousand odd people. There were a range of shutters above your head and as a

shutter dropped down you put in a plug which restored the shutter and you answered the person calling. When they called you they would say “I want so and so at whatever number” and it was in the local exchange. You would pick up, there were two rows of plugs, you’d pick up like you’d use the front one to

answer the call and the top one you would plug in to the particular number they wanted. And as you did that you pulled back a switch, there were rows and rows of switches, you’d pull back the switch and ring. And it would go, “bing, bing, bing”, or whatever and someone would answer it and you’d connect it and away you’d go, they were connected. When they’d finish the call you

pressed a button which recorded their call on it. However, if they wanted to call further afield, a trunk line, then you’d switch them over to your trunk line. With your trunk plug you’d switch into the trunk line connection. And then the trunk line would answer and if they wanted to call say Sydney the trunk line operator would get on a line to Sydney and say, “We’re calling

Sydney 4576”, or whatever it might be and the Sydney operator would switch it through to the particular Sydney number that you wanted. Then the operator on trunk lines would work out and would write out what they called a trunk docket. Because in the process of booking the call through, she’d book the call coming through, the originating call, and whoever it went to.

And that docket was then passed on to another person working in the telephone officer and that would be call pricing. The call would be priced. And then all those dockets, hundreds of them, would be sorted out and sent downstairs to another section in the post office

where the phone call was booked against the person, against the number, to get their bill. And that was how it worked. That was virtually the process wasn’t it mother? Yes.

You’d keep on going over them like that monitoring and

when the telephone call was finished you’d ask the question, “Have you finished?” If there was no answer you’d hang up. It was a fairly simple procedure but there were people wandering around all the time. They were called monitors and their object was to see that you were

quite civil to people, you weren’t cranky or short tempered and you were business like. If you weren’t you were reported. And there was a person in charge called the traffic officer who would reprimand you if you didn’t do the job properly. Most people did but there were some very obnoxious

subscribers too but then of course the customer is always right isn’t he? Sometimes.

No, you could, let’s see, I could and most of the fellows working on it could, when we were working at night we used to work off a central section and because there

wasn’t two thousand one hundred subscribers in front of you. They were spread right around in batches of one hundred, two hundred people. But you could after a while, thirty or forty feet away, you could pick the particular number calling you. That was subscriber 1257 and you’d pick that. You either had to do that or walk down and have a

look. But, you know, you got that experience that you could pick them at a difference. And if they wanted to call trunk service you could work your trunk line out from that too. No, it was a relatively simple thing to do but it took some getting to know what the situation was,

where the person was calling from and what they wanted to do. You had to know the whole system through to work every night. They used to give us jobs to do, what were some of the jobs? They were afraid that people would go to sleep at night, I don’t know how they would work that out, but we were that busy in the central place.

True enough, some of the suburban exchanges with say three or four or five hundred subscribers on it only, would hardly get any calls at all and they’d go to sleep. But the boys in the main exchange could not. They weren’t able

to do that. There were two of us on at night and we were pretty well flat out answering phone calls particularly if you were there at night everybody would be calling up for taxis and things like that. And we’d also handle the public telephones

and with public telephones you had to see that they inserted their coins before you could connect them. The other jobs they had us do was we had two or three thousand of these trunk dockets to stamp up each night. They got us to stamp them up with the date on them so that we knew what date they were, the pricing officer knew what

date to register the call. So we’d stamp the previous day’s work.

No. I’ve forgotten that. Do you know? How much would it be? One and six. Mind you, it only cost me

threepence to go from my home in Merewether to the city. What’s that?

Well prices have changed haven’t they? I was on ten dollars a week in today’s terms in those days.

It’s all relative.

I didn’t come across it at all. It was in Joan’s family, particularly her sister. She was involved with the surf club. The surf club movement was very strong in Newcastle. And quite a number of her

boyfriends were surfers. As we understood it, it was lifesavers and more of that kind of thing. So rather than a surf culture it was a lifesaving culture. The skills they developed they used to protect the surfers. And surfing as I understood it as a teenager was that

we’d go to a number of the beaches in Newcastle and jump up and down in the waves. We couldn’t swim much. I can remember one occasion where I got sucked out into an area where I couldn’t swim very far and one of the lifesavers there took me and brought me back in. Surfing, as such, as we recognise it

today was popular enough, catching a wave and coming in with the wave was great fun. I never, ever got involved too much in that side of it. My interest went more towards racing bikes and things like that. I was more interested in that and

also later on in playing cricket for a while and then fishing later on. So sporting activities centred around not so much the surfing side because for starters I was quite some distance away from the surf. And Joan’s situation, she lived in Merewether and so did her sister with her of

course and they were right on the beach. There were a number of very popular beaches particularly Merewether and Bar Beach. For me it was more important to race bikes and get involved in that side of it.

We raced at a place called Stockton. Stockton is a suburb of Newcastle on the northern side of it and

two clubs there, there was an amateur club and a professional club. There wasn’t a lot of difference between the two except the amateurs only got cups when they won a race and the professionals got paid some money for whatever they did. The difference between the standard of riding was very little. I eventually got to be

scratch man in the club. It’s an awful feeling if you’re in a race and you look out and see all these big strong fellows all in front of you and you give them all a start and you’ve got to catch them up and beat them. It’s pretty hard I can tell you that. Yes, that was near the

time when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and they were coming down. That was about the end of cycling as far as I was concerned. It really did change the emphasis on how we viewed the war when the Japanese came into the war.

We didn’t have any television in those days. We didn’t have a lot of communication. However, radio had general acceptance and we did hear

it over the radio that we were at war. We heard of the war principally through our newspapers. I think the newspaper would have been the main source of information about what was happening over in Europe. It didn’t greatly

touch us here. It was more like a phoney war in some respects. We had sent troops over to the Middle East and the war down there was certainly terrible s far as we were concerned but it hadn’t impacted us as far as knowing

people that were killed. And the biggest shock to us was when the Japanese attacked Darwin. That was a great shock. And in particular the events about which I’ve spoke, the attack on Newcastle, whether it was psychological or otherwise. But to

me the way it started to impact on us was the things we couldn’t got. And really what woke us up to a large extent is the rationing that came in. It caused a lot of people to start hoarding people. We didn’t realise that sugar was so precious, some of the principle things, sugar and tea and stuff like that.

Yes, rationing it affected the housewife greatly. It affected all areas and clothing and things like that. Although as far as we were concerned as I understood it

we had enormous amounts of food and wheat and wool and cattle and sheep and stuff like that. So it didn’t impact us so much that we were ever threatened with starvation or anything like that. But many of the good that we took as the norm disappeared. They just

weren’t there. For instance I was talking about racing bikes and things like that. Bike parts, which we got from France, just disappeared. Any of the stuff that we could have got from Europe, or England for that matter, just weren’t available. We had to virtually live on our own resources as such. And we were really the lucky country as far as

food and things like that were concerned. I think rationing probably continued after the war a bit longer than it should have. What it did cause was people to become hoarders. For instance, if sugar became available in a shop people would go and buy as much as they could. More than what they

needed and it brought out the ugly side of people sometimes and they just hoarded things that they should have shared.

Foodstuffs and things like that, hearsay more than anything else. Radio wasn’t used that

much. The main source of information was the newspaper and that was critical to us. We learned a lot about particularly the overseas situation through the newspapers and through the pictures given there. Also another source of information was the newsreels we got on our movie pictures in our theatres and places like

that. We got a lot of critical information there particularly once the Pacific War started. There was a lot of information given through that. I think it was Damien Parer who conveyed a lot of things and what it was really in

some of those places. Because the Pacific Islands from my experience there was no place of joy really. You know, you see it promoted today as places of paradise but, no, not really.

More of a coal mining area. There could have been farms but our only recollection of Greta now has been over the years just passing through on the way to Newcastle. I don’t see it as a farming centre. I don’t know really what the main source of income would be there,

, I’m not sure.

A city boy because that’s my earliest memory. I’ve got no early memories of Greta at all.

I didn’t think in terms like that, no. Maybe I would have if I’d have been a country boy but city boys don’t think in terms like that. I don’t think so anyway. At least I didn’t that’s all I can say.

Yes. I’m pretty sure I was at the telegraph office when the announcement came through. I don’t know how it came through. It must have been over the telephone but I’m not sure about that. I’m not sure.

Yes. Sixteen to be exact. It was the 3rd of September and I would have been seventeen in a fortnight’s time.

That’s right yes.

No. What gave us the impetus was the Japanese coming in.

As far as I can say most of the cycling friends I had and people I worked with who were of the same age group there wasn’t a concern about the European war as we saw it or the Middle East war. There wasn’t any real concern until the Japanese came in and

then something had to be done because the country was in real danger. As a matter of fact we didn’t quite realise until later on how close the Japanese were. And I suppose shelling the city you live in gives you a pretty good idea that you’re in somebody’s sights.

It would be January 1942. I don’t know the date.

Oh yes. I clearly remember that.

Yes, shortly before and afterwards I quickly I enlisted. Working

on the dog watch shift all night. I don’t even remember the mate that was with me but there’d be two of us on. And about two or three o clock in the morning we had a phone call from Sydney, the Sydney trunk exchange that Sydney was being

attacked. And about an hour later I hear the shells passing overhead. Have you ever heard a shell passing over head? It’s like a train going through a tunnel.

It’s got a peculiar sound. I recognised the sound because I witnessed guns being fired from Fort Scratchley which was right at the beginning near Nobby’s. And I heard the same sort of sound when they were

practising. What had happened was the Japanese had shelled, apparently they knew enough about Newcastle, they were selling apparently Port Scratchley which was near Nobby’s. Now one of the places that was near Port Scratchley, very near it, was a

place called Parnell Place. The shells landed, two or three or four of them, landed in Parnell Place. So apparently they were aimed at Port Scratchley. About that time the shells going overhead were going almost directly over the post office and were aimed towards BHP where they landed.

They reported later that no damage was done because they were armour-piercing shells. That was the excuse they gave. This is only hearsay as far as I’m concerned. Mind you they were pretty careless with the truth in those days. They didn’t want to frighten people. They landed on BHP. And then it was over. It didn’t

last very long. One of the mechanics that was there working nights, because they had to have mechanics on night duty, said “They’re shelling us, I’m off”. So he disappeared. Quite a prudent move I thought. But anyway, after all the shelling, all the lights were on in Newcastle by the way. All the street lights were

on and everything. After the shelling had finished, about twenty minutes or half an hour later, all the sirens started and all the lights went off. I suppose that’s what happens when people are not expecting something like that. It’s unbelievable.

I think Newcastle slept through most of it I really do and why wouldn’t they? Mind you, if they had started the sirens earlier they might have woken a few of them up. But afterwards I went out and had a look at some of the damage done. There wasn’t a lot. I don’t think there were any homes destroyed or anything like

that. They didn’t create a lot of damage but what they had done psychologically was another thing. Maybe that worked against them because it really woke up the people of Newcastle. It certainly woke up myself and my mates. We thought, “Hello, we’ve got to do something about this”.

And that’s when pretty well all of us joined up.

No, we didn’t join up together. I think we were all of the same mind. Mind you, with the way we were working, two of us on one night and four of us on day shift or afternoon shift,

there wasn’t a lot of communication between us in any case. But the end result was that we all joined up. So I think there wasn’t a boy left in the exchange. But Newcastle woke up and we really got to putting tape across all the windows of all the

shops. We really got into the business of putting air raid shelters, these ugly concrete blocks. Have you seen them at all?

They had quite a number of those around, particularly in the main areas.

No, they’d be long gone

unless they are there for historical reasons. I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen any at all in my visits back there because they weren’t very pretty. Who’d want to keep them? They were just a big ugly cement block. To me it seemed more of a death trap than anything else. I really don’t think that with the number of people that would be in the city at any time that any

number of cement blocks would prove to be much of a safety place to go to.

Yes. I suspect so. A lot of it was done for that purpose. Joan’s father built himself an air raid shelter and

I think a lot of people did too. That was only like a grave, I suppose that’s the nearest way you could describe it. We’ve got a picture of him down in this air raid shelter. In fact a friend of mine was writing an account of the Scottish clan that she belongs to, the Buchanans, and she was trying to

describe what it was like during the war years and she didn’t have a photograph of any air raid shelters but she’d read my book, the life story, and in that there’s a picture of my father-in-law digging and air raid shelter and she said, “I’d like that”. So it is in her book now of him digging this grave I suppose, that’s about all it would be.

No, it wouldn’t be a very pleasant place. It would be about how long? Ten feet high by about twenty feet wide by about thirty or forty feet. They weren’t very pleasant places. I think they were used by drunks and people like that. I don’t think they were very healthy.

It may have something to do with it but probably the motivating factor was two uncles and a cousin who

joined the air force as pilots, not as pilots but to be trained as pilots. And some of my friends where I lived had also joined the air force at the same time. So that seemed to be the main factor and it seemed a very effective way of playing my part in the war.

They didn’t oppose me. They went along with it.

Two of my brothers were in protected industries. Well I was too for that matter being in the post office, in communications. They sorted things out into protected industries in those days. I think it was probably as far as the peer pressure was concerned, I don’t know if you can describe it as

that but all the fellows I worked with joined up and you did it and it all happened at the same time to us all. I haven’t searched motivations but I suspect that’s what it was. My parents went along with it. I don’t think they were happy about it but it was necessary.

I don’t know actually. They were disparate. I would imagine that the air force didn’t have the same attraction for them that it had to me. Mind you, not that I knew anything about the

air force in those days. No, I didn’t. It just seemed a good avenue and the right place to go.

I’ve lost contact with them altogether and I don’t even know what happened to them. Of course that was when the war was over. That was another three or four years later on.

I had no way of finding out either. There was no way I could know what happened to them. I don’t know.

I

went to an enlistment centre in Newcastle. I’m digging back a bit now. What can I remember about it? I was passed before a medical board, heart and all that kind of stuff. And I was pretty fit, if you

remember, I’d been a racing cyclist . And also because my mate, Toby Thomas, was only a little fellow, he was only about five feet tall, we’d joined the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association] in Newcastle and I’d done all the exercises. They had an exercise routine to

do, push ups and all that kind of stuff. I played basketball and so on and so I was pretty fit and I had no trouble passing the medical because even if I say so myself I was able to go on a cycle race of one hundred and thirty miles which is, you know, four or five or six hours on a

racing cycle. So physically, yes, I don’t know about mentally, but physically I was right.

I had to wait a long while and that got up my nose as a matter of fact.

They gave me a badge to wear, that’s all. And they said, “We’ll call you up when we can”. And that didn’t happen until ten months later on. I enlisted in January and it wasn’t until the 10th of October 1942 that they put me in as a pilot.

Maybe, you’ve got to say this, the training facilities weren’t there I would think. And maybe instead of enlisting as air crew, I didn’t enlist as a pilot I enlisted as air crew, if I’d have joined the army I would have been there straight away.

I don’t know. Unfortunately, I wasn’t privy to all their thinking.

I don’t know exactly how I got informed. It must have been something like that, I passed my medical,

just report to Bradfield Park. When I got there of course I was issued with the uniform and all that kind of stuff. I’ve got an idea that at the initial stage I took the oath of allegiance and things like that and was

passed over as okay physically but Bradfield Park was when the real thing was on. I was issued with a uniform and introduced to the air force ways. But it seems a long time to wait doesn’t it?

I don’t really know. I suppose it is labour intensive when you think about it because you had to employ a messenger to deliver it for a start. You had to employ somebody

to take it. Say you’d have to go to a post office and you’d have to employ a postal clerk to take the essence of the message and then you’d have to employ the people to send it. So, you know, it would go through a number of chains wouldn’t it when you think about it. And then when you’d gone through the initial stages of that then you’d have to work on the receiving end of it and somebody to

receive it and also to employ somebody to deliver it. There was probably maybe a dozen people involved in it and probably more.

Well a lot of fellows came in at the same time. What they did is they’d take us in what they called flights. A flight was composed of about thirty odd men. So we went in by flights and they were housed in the same hut. And they

went through all the physicals. You’ve got the idea of a group of men, thirty odd men, all clothed together, clothed in the same stuff, fed together, housed together and went all together in things. And each flight progressed, and there’d be several flights going through the initial training school, until finally you’d passed all your physicals and

you’d passed all the educational side of it. You had to be up to a certain level. You could fail at any stage. If you couldn’t work out the mathematics that were required of you of course you wouldn’t be any good as a pilot or anything like that. So you had to be up to a certain educational level and a certain physical level and so on.

So people were, the description was, scrubbed off course. So if you got scrubbed off that would happen and you’d drop by the wayside. I’d be interested to know all the stages you’d have to go through before you got to be a combat pilot. You see when you went through the EFTS, the Elementary Flying

School, you got your wings. You soloed and as soon as you soloed you were entitled to wear the wings. But that wasn’t the end of it by a long chalk because you were proficient in flying a Tiger Moth, you know, a put together with string kind of biplane that would be no good in combat. You’d have to pass all the other stages.

But I’d be interested to find out, like the initial flight started off with thirty, by the time we got to combat level how many would be left. Some would die through the process. I wouldn’t have been surprised if fifty percent got through because, you know, just the flight before mine two men

died.

Yes, in a plane crash. And progressively as you go through there are much more difficult parts. When I was at Point Cook, of course it’s a very large air force base, there were trainee pilots there

and they were losing people out of flights there. They were getting lost and crashing and so on. That’s part of the learning process. Psychologically they wouldn’t say, “Well, you’ve joined the flight now, you’ve got about a twenty percent chance of

finally getting to combat level”. They couldn’t say that could they. I don’t know. The air force probably knew.

That was the scariest thing of the whole lot. I never got to that stage but some of the friends I was of course did. One of my

mates, the way you get your wings is you go solo. What we were doing when we first started is called circuits and bumps. But when you are solo you haven’t got the comfort of your instructor behind you. You are on your own. You take off and you do a circle around and then you land. One of the

maxims is not to hold off bank. That is when you are circling like that you don’t hold off. How can I describe it? You don’t do the wrong thing by the circle. If you hold off bank what happens is that you dip down like that. I can remember one of my

mates, I was watching him do his solo, and he held off bank and his plane started to plunge down like that. He only had a few hundred feet to manoeuvre and he disappeared behind a hangar. And I was waiting to hear the bang and he pulled it out just in time. I don’t know what he did but that’s how simple it is.

I think quite a number of the fellows fell by the wayside in the learning process.

That’s right.

There was none of that. On

reflection it would have been foolish continuing with me as a pilot because I’m sure deep in my heart I could have made learned to fly but whether I would have fallen by the wayside along the way. I think the commanding officer would have to be pretty sure of his

men to let them continue on doing that.

I believe in guardian angels and I’ve written bout that. A number of times the guardian angels have saved me. I honestly belong in guardian angels.

I know a lot of people that don’t but I do.

We reckon we’ve had a very fortunate life. We really have.

Oh yes. That’s like the fellow, the optimist, one glass is half full and the other one is half empty isn’t it?

That’s one thing I learned about my break down, to think positively all the time. I don’t always do it but I try and do it, don’t I ever. I try and do it. And I’ve written about that too. Positivity I call it and negativity. Negativity is when

the glass is half empty.

It takes all the fun out of it.

Life’s not meant to be that way.

That’s right.

I coped okay. I had no problem with discipline but I don’t like unthinking people. That’s part of the military mind. Probably, that’s been the problem with crocs all along. We do get rebellious and we do get stubborn. You only have to look at my family for a second to know something about them. They’re all

rebels.

I went along with it. I accepted it and I didn’t fight it but maybe over the years I have learned otherwise. I find that in life there are

people that like power for power’s sake. And generally the people that like power for power’s sake are horrible people and they shouldn’t be there and quite often they’re not the right people for the job.

It would be at the beginning because I joined a flight initially and I believe from that point onwards I was classified as pilot, pilot only as a matter of fact. And that’s when the weeding out process started, right from the very first I think.

For instance, if I couldn’t do the obstacle course then that would have been it. But I was very fit having just finished a Goulburn to Sydney bike race in very hot temperatures. As a matter of fact, just as a digression, it was the

toughest race that I would have thought there’s been for many years because when you leave Goulburn you start to climb a hill. I’d never been over the course. I’d trained in Newcastle and that was it. But when you start from Goulburn, it’s down in a valley, you start a climb. And usually with a climb you go

up and down and up and down but it was a seven-mile climb all told. And you’d go up and level, and up and up. Eighty of the cyclists dropped off on that first hill, Governor’s Hill they called it. But I wasn’t too fresh after that but I stayed with it.

There were one hundred and forty

people in the race. Today of course and the way they train, well they’re doing one now, a tour of Australia, but they’re real professionals. They’ve got much better equipment than what we had and they’ve got people that back up with their machines and a whole range of things. But, yes, I was fit. I really was fit.

That’s right, yes. I’d never been in a plane before. I think maybe that was part of the problem because I wasn’t used to machinery. I had never driven a car and never

owned one and only on occasion had I been in one. I think if I’d have had a car licence and maybe if I’d have driven a car maybe the fact that when you pressed the accelerator you knew that you had an enormous amount of power at your fingertips

and maybe the story would have been different. I certainly wasn’t used to machinery but maybe I wasn’t the only one like that. I suspect in those days that it wouldn’t have happened to a lot of people and it certainly wouldn’t have happened to teenagers anyway. So maybe that was a factor I don’t know.

Yes. The surprise when you first take

off in a plane is that you look down and that below you. And of course when we took off with a plane there was a road outside the perimeter of the strip and when you hit the road your plane would bump like that and that was a bit of a fright. But you got used to that.

The Tiger Moth was quite sensitive to wind and variation and things like that. So just as well they chose Temora because it is very stable air. Once you got used to that bump of the road there were no real problems it was fairly still.

Not that I know of. I certainly didn’t. Well, really I suppose when you think of it, you’re too busy trying to think about what you’ve got to do and listen to your instructor telling you to do this and that and so on. Your full attention is taken with doing things like that. I found, I had a boating interest

after I retired and I went to help some of my mates on trawlers and the same thing, seasickness didn’t affect me at all. I suspect if I’d only been there as a passenger and not helping with all the work that was required it might have been another story. A lot of

air sickness and sea sickness is to do with the mind. If your mind focuses on something else, what is it with a male? They tell you that a male can only focus on one thing at a time whereas a woman can do several things at a time. I find that hard to believe because when I was

running elections I would have the whole election in mind, the whole business, a thousand different things to do, and I kept them all in mind. So I question the reality of that statement. The ladies are smiling.

I don’t know precisely what happened with the one where the two were killed, the instructor and his pilot. I was on guard duty and I went out to

guard the crash site. I did something quite naughty there.

There were lots of scraps of parachutes, all burned around the edges. I took one and I wrote on it the circumstances. All that I could remember, the names of the

two people involved and where it occurred and the date that it occurred and so on. I kept it for many years. As a matter of fact I rang up the Temora Museum that’s there about the air force and asked them if they were interested. I couldn’t get any sense out of them so I gave it away. My daughter’s got it

now and she keeps things like that so maybe one day it will turn up but I don’t know. I don’t know whether anybody is really interested. I wrote a bit about it but it was a bit of a reminder of the price some people paid just to be taught how to fly.

No, about that time I’d been scrubbed the course and I all I was doing was waiting for a call up to Point Cook. But I don’t think it would have effected me in any case because I took a fairly philosophical view of some of the things that happened to you when you were learning. It’s a very sobering kind of thought but things like that do happen.

The friend I mentioned some tie ago, Toby Thomas, he was in the air force too at much the same time as I. But he was in as an air gunner and he was killed on a training flight or something like that. That was over in England.

No, just that detail, it’s the only thing I have.

I’ve got a feeling the Tiger Moth is one of the easiest planes to fly, it’s very sensitive though.

I think probably it’s one of the most sophisticated, no it wouldn’t be sophisticated, its simple. It would have been one of the most common ones that people had learned to fly on and they’re still flying around today. What’s that? A lifetime of

seventy or eighty years isn’t it?

Well it speaks for itself doesn’t it? Yes, that’s an easy plane to fly. Unfortunately I couldn’t so it couldn’t have been that easy.

Yes, ten

hours.

Well, maybe they had time constraints. That’s one thing about the air force they never felt the necessity to explain things. “You’re out. Goodbye. Who’s the next one?” Maybe time constraints were on I don’t know. Maybe it would have been better if they’d have gone into full

explanations of what happened. I don’t know. That’s something I’m not aware of.

Nothing very much as a matter of fact. We had to get up very early. Most of the flights were up in the air at five o clock in the morning so that meant getting up about

four or something like that. There were picture shows there but that was about the limit of it I think.

No I can only reconstruct it as far as I was concerned. I’d get up early in the morning with the rest of them, my memory is not

clear on this on. I don’t know whether I even had something to eat, probably not. We’d then go with the instructor and we’d take off and go to a satellite aerodrome,

there were a number of those. I suspect that was because of the training schedule. Take off, circle, land, take off, circle and land. We used to call that circuits and bumps. After that was finished I wouldn’t think it would be much later than

mid morning. So if we started flying at five, well we were only allowed ten hours instruction so how much time would he give me? It wouldn’t be hours would it? No, it would only be an hour or so and then back to the air force base. I’m trying to reconstruct things. There were other things we had to learn so probably that time was then

spent say learning navigation or something like that.

I’m not sure. It didn’t impact me very much. We did learn navigation and we did

learn meteorology. Subjects close to the area of flying we needed to know. I think there were subjects like gunnery. There was a full range of things to learn. As far as I could reconstruct it in my mind, the early hours in the

morning would have been used because of the stillness of the air and because of the time allowed of ten hours. I suspect that would have been spread out over ten days. And the rest of the time we weren’t idle we were doing related

things as I just said and probably PT [physical training] as well to strengthen the body. That would be it.

It was large enough. I

wouldn’t think, on the scale of Point Cook it wasn’t anything near as big as that. Point Cook was really large and well established and it had buildings that had been there for fifty years or something like that. But, no, it was a war time set up. It was set up because of the climatic conditions out there but it was large enough to take

quite a number of planes. But that was all we were doing at the Elementary Flying Training School so then the planes that would be involved would be Tiger Moths and that would be about it. And of course all the ancillary stuff, hangars and mechanics and other stuff like that.

I was brought up before I think it was the CO [commanding officer] and he broke the news to me that he didn’t think they could continue with me. The explanation he gave was that the

trouble was I was landing the plane a few feet too high. And he claimed that what was happening was that you pull a finger and you focus on it and you always come in like that. One eye wasn’t coming in as fast as the other one was and there was an imbalance. So what I was reading on the ground when I was approaching, the approach was about sixty miles an hour in those days, where I thought I was right on

deck in reality I was several feet above and of course you go like that. That was the theory he put up. I’ve got no reason to disbelieve him. But when he gave me that kind of information the thing was so full on, what it meant then was that if I had to land planes that had to land at say one hundred and fifty or twice the speed the

resultant landing would be much more violent than the other one. So that being so it made so much sense.

I felt rotten about it. I didn’t cry though. I think I was reasonably philosophical about

it when it was put that way. You move on to other things. They gave me a choice. They didn’t say, “Okay, you’re no good as a pilot, you’ll go out as a guard now”. They could have done that. They had the right to do that. But I thought that when they gave me a choice that was good. But the mustering by the way or wireless operators was quite high in the

air force. The musterings in those days I think they had four or five and it was Number 2 on them and the pay was slightly more generous, not much. It was ten and sixpence a day I think or something like that which compared to six bob a day is a bit more. I

didn’t go around buying cars, no.

Yes. We were allowed to do this. But of course when I got married and went overseas prior to that I used to send a certain out of ten shillings a day or ten and six you could send

any amount you wanted to. I think when I got married I sent something like seven shillings a pay, deferred pay it was called, back home. It meant that at the end of the war I had a nest egg of, how much was it? Three hundred pounds or something like that so it mounted up.

That was very handy when we were married to buy furniture and stuff like that.

Yes.

Well,

Morse, Morse, Morse, they pumped it into us at different speeds. They increased it up as you kept on going. I don’t remember precisely all the details of it but involved a lot of sending and a lot of receiving, more receiving than sending. The thing about Morse

Code is that we were required to reach a certain level and it was twenty words per minute. Now, a word consisted of five characters, that was a word. But each letter consisted of a number of individual characters. For instance the letter B is dash, three dots, “Da da da dit”.

Four characters and that and twenty words per minute. I think I did some sums on it, works out at all told about, I haven’t got the figures, how much? A thousand characters a minute or something like that, individual characters,

which is a lot to push through your brain. It’s not possible individually as single units but yes it is possible when you think of the characters coming through you as a complete unit. So we were taught to sound it out, the B as,

“Da da da dit”. And that’s one of the training processes we had. A, “Da da”. R, “Da da dit”. Even after all these years I can still read Morse. It’s there and it will be there until the day I die I suspect. But the working speed was around about thirty odd words a minute which at the rate of symbols coming through it is an enormous rate.

But if you read it as a phonetic language then, yes. As a matter of fact at one stage I struck some character, an American by the way. I don’t dislike Americans. When I was working up in the islands there were quite a number of

air force stations, this was at Tarakan and I was doing this watch. He came on like a flash. He was doing sixty words a minute, twice our normal speed, and it was coming through like bullets. He had some poor devil receiving it. And the fellow was stopping and saying, “Please repeat, please repeat”. There was a code for that, QR or something.

And it took him five minutes to get through a message which should have only taken about a minute. It was quite merciless of him, he didn’t slow down. But I took everything down, I wrote it all down, and when he came on to me, I had it all down. So what do I do? “QRQ”, “Can you send faster?” And then he sent it twice as fast.

“Received. Can you send faster”. He started to break down. I thought, “There’s some justice in this world after all”. He went too fast.

We had very little to do with plain language. That’s not permitted. You couldn’t do that on the air waves. You couldn’t do it. It wasn’t permitted so all our

reception was in code. Five letter code, or in the case of weather a five figure code. When you took a message it was all broken up in these five letter code groups. What proceeded then is that you passed the encoded message that you’d received through to the cipher room. Every

single unit had a cipher room and they used to use, which was a mystery machine to me, it was an E Machine. And the encoded message was pushed through the E machine which produced plain language for whoever was to receive it. And the same thing happened in reverse. For instance, if the

CO wanted to send a message to another unit it would go to the cipher room and the cipher room would pass the message to be sent to the wireless operator who would send it to whatever station, we’d call up the station. Quite often we were working at headquarters so, you know, we would pass on to some headquarter and quite often over the

land line would go to another unit. But if it was on a land line of course then you could send it in plain language and that usually was the process. It’s something to remember about the Sigs, we were quite often the only way people could get messages through. We were a

key unit in that sense. And if our work wasn’t right or correct the whole thing would fall apart. When we were working by the way, it’s a funny thing about things in those days that the frequencies used to change. During the day time for instance

you’d be working on a certain frequency and then particularly later in the day the ozone layer used to drop and the frequency would change. So if you were working on say four thousand five hundred kilocycles they’d suddenly just disappear. But you’d have alternative frequencies to get on when four thousand five hundred wasn’t

accessible because of the affect of the late afternoon. Then you would move to say three thousand five hundred or something like that. And then you’d call up the station you were working and you’d send your call sign out and they’d pick you up and away you’d go again. That was a feature of

the transmissions we had. It was possible to work long distances. The set we had was about that high and as a frequency changed you would pull out, I forget what it was called, it was a machine or a block

like that that used to vibrate at a certain speed. It would give you a certain range of signals you could send. So, you know, if you had to change from four thousand five hundred kilocycles to three thousand five hundred or whatever, you would pull one out and you would stick the other one in and you’d work away on that.

So quite often you had to be aware. When you were working sometimes you knew that at a certain time of day things would change. And quite often it would get hollow sounding. It would get a different sound to it. You’d tell the fellows at the other end, you’d tell them to change and you’d change it.

Sometimes it would be very quick. It

depends how quickly the ozone layer dropped. What happened was, or how it was explained to me, is that the signal that was sent out would hit there and bounce back like that. Now as that dropped it was at a different angle, a different frequency. Different frequencies bounce at different heights so

you had to watch out.

I wouldn’t have a clue. We received thousands and thousands of messages over the years but I didn’t have a clue what was in any of them.

I’ve got a feeling that we didn’t do too much work on encoded messages. I’ve got a feeling it was done mainly in plain language and the reason for that would be that it’s easier to mark correctly what you were doing. That’s when we really got into an operational

unit that it was all encoded. There were exceptions to that. I can remember one where we were working in an air radio one between Gove and Horn Island. Horn Island was a

squadron or an air field placed over on the tip of Queensland. One of the planes, it was a few miles out, quite a distance from Horn Island and it was in trouble. The engine was failing and they were losing height and going into the sea there. And they

didn’t worry about codes or anything like that, straight, plain language. In an emergency and that was okay. But I wasn’t working that one fortunately. It was a very tough time for the fellow that was doing it though. He had all the big shots gathered around him. It was pretty difficult to work that one because it took an experienced operator to work it because it

was loaded with lots and lots of messages coming through at the same time. You couldn’t shut them up because they might be a thousand miles away. You had to have the ability to read through all the extraneous noises and just focus on that one. You were able to do that after you’d been working as a wireless operator. You could train yourself just to

listen to one noise. That’s again what the brain can do at times, it can do marvellous things.

No it was fairly basic sort of material as far as I can remember. We weren’t really trained that much on as far as I can remember

any working models as such. We were there to learn to read and send Morse and you don’t need any kind of sophisticated material for that. I don’t remember what we used to work on as a matter of fact but it certainly wasn’t what we called the AR7 was the name of the machine we commonly used. And they were about a metre high or something like that.

It was mainly Morse. We were there to concentrate on Morse. There weren’t many other subjects that we had to learn. We were

to be as expert on that, on the Morse Code, as we could because it was the communication system we were using. I don’t know whether we got that at Point Cook or not, we may have had to learn the Aldus Lamp but I don’t think so. I think we learned that in air crew.

The Aldus Lamp sends Morse Code. It’s a search light. It has a trigger on it and you can do your dots and dashes on that. It’s not used much in the air force as far as I know. It wasn’t in those days. I never had occasion to use it but of course it’s fairly common on board ships.

The only way I can explain it is it’s a language all of its own. It’s a peculiar one. It’s a sound language and it has its rhythms and it has its peculiarities so that you speak differently to me and I speak differently to Heather [interviewer].

And if we’re in a darkened room you could tell which one was speaking by the way we speak. The same thing happens with Morse Code. You’d hardly think it but it’s quite characteristic. Particularly the weather codes were sent out by a machine they went through a tape or something like that. And that was quite

mechanical and that was quite distinctive because it was so perfect. You knew it was a machine that was sending it out to you. But as soon as somebody got on a Morse kit to send it you got to know each other that way. I explained it in my book as best I could but that was one of the characteristics of moving. That’s why we got

moved around a lot because the enemy would know, they wouldn’t know me personally, Bill Croft, but they would know that there was a fellow at Gove who was sending messages and they knew where he was because even in those days they could use directional finding

machinery. They could locate you fairly easily by two stations set apart, they could triangle. They could know my signals, they’d know yours, and if at the same time they knew where Bill Croft was there was a flying boat base

and the next time they hear Bill Croft sending who is a thousand miles away they move the flying boat base. So they way they counteracted it I believe was they moved us around a bit.

Well it’s a big like a voice. Some people speak clearly and distinctly and other people don’t. That’s about as near as I can put it.

But each Morse code operator has a distinct style. You can tell the difference when you hear something that has been put through tape. It’s so mechanical and it’s so perfect, you know what I mean, as against ordinary people. Each one of us

would be fractionally different. Like a B, “Da da da dit”, it still sounds like a B. But maybe you might hang on to the da just a fraction too long. “Daa da da dit”, or, “Da da da dit”, or softer or whatever. It wouldn’t be softer but it would be slightly differently paced so that the hearing

would pick it up. It would become through more as an impression because you’re talk about maybe hundredths or a second between each dit but there is a difference and to be an operator you can understand that. If somebody hasn’t an ear tuned to that sort of noise wouldn’t pick the difference at all.

I suspect the new operators learning it at school would not know anything about that. We were trained to be consistent in the way we sent but nevertheless the particular style would be there.

All I got was that I sent my messages and I didn’t have any problem with them. If there’d been bad signals I would have heard of it. But I used what they call a bug. You’ve seen a normal Morse key what it looks like? It’s a bar with a knob on the

end and you press it up and down. Now what I used was an automatic or semi-automatic one and that was constructed with a straight bar going out like that and a vibrator on it. So if you held it down like that it would, go, “Dit, dit, dit, dit, dit”, because it has a spring attachment on it. And if you press it the other way it will go, “da, da, da, da”. So

the operation was like that so that side sends the “das” and that side sends the “dits”. So you’d go, “Da” and then you’d go, “Dit, dit, dit, dit”, whatever number you wanted. It was a question of timing. It took a bit more, I wouldn’t say skill, a bit more practice to do it that way. But what it did mean is you could send for a very long time because you were only rolling your wrist.

So it was a bug I was using. It was permitted to use it. It was quite OK.

They were called bugs. That was our own particular description of them. You could buy them. I bought my own. They weren’t on air force issue. I could use a Morse key like that ok but I found that kind of action acceptable.

You had the ability of tightening the thing up if you wanted to send really fast like that character that I was talking about, from America, that got up my nose. You could speed this thing up to a ridiculous speed but it would go beyond your control to send it properly. It was a lovely kind of thing to use.

You only had to roll your wrist. I’m intrinsically Lazy. You ask my wife, she’ll tell you.

Yes. It’s all there. I practise every now and again. I’m in a waiting room waiting for a doctor and I read all the signs in Morse Code. Mum doesn’t know I

do that, do you? I translate it to Morse Code.

You’ve got a mind like that too.

Yes, we understand each other.

Yes, by far. In the post office that’s where of course I first saw Morse Code being used. I couldn’t read a post office clacker because it was a different kind of machine. The Morse Code that we heard on radio

was a phonetic one. That’s why I say what they taught us to do initially was, “Da, da, da, dit, da, da, da, da, da” and all this sort of business. We were taught phonetically and we heard it phonetically. But when it was done in the post office it was in a box arrangement where it made a clacking noise. The symbols were the same and everything else but the person who’d

learned phonetically, the way we were taught in the air force, would have great difficulty trying to read the post office type of morse code. A strange thing one of the reasons I chose it was that maybe in the future I could use it. I never did. I became a clerk and had no further use for it. And

furthermore it was one of the technologies that didn’t last all that long. So it was a bygone technology. It was very useful. One thing about it was that it had an advantage over radio particularly the long distance stuff, it could be read under all sorts of atrocious conditions. If you were

reading through a heavy storm you could read morse code through that. You couldn’t hear a voice quite often through heavy static. I get stuck here sometimes of a night when I try and turn the radio on and all I’m getting is static all the time but I could read morse code through that. It’s more penetrating. It

had its advantages.

They’d ask you to repeat it, “Please repeat”.

Yes, particularly if it was a very important message but of course in code you wouldn’t know if it was important or not. I never, ever got queries from the cipher room about the quality of the stuff I handed it so it must have been reasonably good stuff. And that’s where the first complaints would have come from. The cipher clerk would have said, “Hey, Bill, that was a load of

rubbish you gave me”, because that’s what they’d tell you. We were in communication because it was just like one room to the next. Although we didn’t mix very much with them, we certainly weren’t allowed in the cipher room.

No, not at twenty odd years of age. You’re not afraid of anything and at twenty I must confess you haven’t got a great sense of responsibility. You’ve got a job to do and you

do it and that’s it and when it was over you’d go back to your tent or whatever and do what you do when you’re there.

Oh yes, before I joined the air force.

We were engaged very early in the piece. We were engaged when I joined up weren’t we? When did we get engaged? It was very shortly after that wasn’t it.

Yes, it was six or eight months after joining up.

There’s a story in that.

I saved up thirty pounds which to me was a lot of money and I

said, “Will you marry me?” “Yes, okay”, “We’ll go and get a ring”. I think I had twenty nine pounds on me and we walked into the jeweller shop and I said, “I want to buy an engagement ring. I’ve got my girlfriend with me”. She said, “What will you put on it?” I said, “To Joan with love from Bill or something like that”. And she said,

a wedding ring, that’s right, an engagement ring. She spent the lot, twenty-nine pounds. Mind you, it was worth every cent of it.

Fifty eight years and a bit.

Yes. I had enough anyway. I wasn’t worried about it but it was a bit of a family joke.

No. I got married during the war.

We were engaged

after being in the air force six or eight months or something like that. And up to Darwin and across to Gove, I think it was about fifteen months or something like that, and then back home on a month’s leave before we went up towards Japan and I said to Joan, “I think we’ll get married”. And she said, “What a good idea”.

We didn’t have any time to get ready and we didn’t have any time to get nervous or anything like that so we got married. This was all in a matter of a week or two and we had our honeymoon.

We were engaged to be married so it wasn’t a great surprise really. As a matter of fact I suppose when you think about it from the actual time that we had together from the time of our engagement to the time of our marriage it was only a matter of just a week or two

really because the rest of the time I was in the air force. Yes, I was only one a few weeks leave before I went up north.

She had a bit of trouble I believe.

Well yes she had a lot of trouble. Trouble over rationing coupons and arranging a church to be married in and arranging all those things that a girl goes through which I don’t understand, getting a wedding dress and lining up

bridesmaids. I didn’t have any trouble with the best man that was my brother and clearing it with the parson. In those days we were married in the Church of England because, there wasn’t a very good reason, because he’d been the minister of the Church of England that I’d attended to when I was a child and he had switched over to

the oldest church in Newcastle, St Johns. In the 1830s or something it was put up, a lovely old building. And we got all that done anyway. We had the odd kafuffle about the wedding ceremony and all that and I don’t think there’s one wedding that goes through that doesn’t have problems.

We got through and we had our honeymoon, all the trouble over that too, oh boy.

We went to Katoomba. That was one of the prime places. That was the pot to go to before the Gold Coast.

The Blue Mountains, a lovely spot.

So Joan had a relative who was an American or her boyfriend was an American and we’d booked in one of the big hotels in Newcastle, the Great Northern Hotel, and they were lovely about that. Yes, no problem about

that. So I had that all fixed up for the wedding night. And the idea was that the next day we were to go on a train early the next day and go on from Newcastle to Katoomba. I was, “Don’t worry about it Bill, I’ve got a mate and I can get you into a hotel in Sydney. So cancel this one in Newcastle and

go to this mates place of mine in Sydney and everything will be ok”. So we did and we get there in Sydney and we go to the hotel. “Bill Croft here and my wife, have you got a booking for us?” “No”. Now it was

the weekend of the Sydney Show, war time, no accommodation at all. A couple of sleazy characters came up to us and said, “Are you in trouble mate? I’ve got accommodation. I’ve got a hotel room just around the corner and

you can take your wife there. Don’t tell anybody just slide in here and everything will be okay”. My wife’s hackles came up at that and all the alarm bells rang and this was midnight you know. “What to do?” We were thinking of sleeping in the park at that stage.

Something like that. Anyway we had a bright idea. One of our friends lived in Sydney who had been to our wedding so we rang her in Newcastle, she was staying in Newcastle then, and we said to her that our friend had let us down. “They don’t know us at this hotel, what can we do?”

“Oh, go out to my place”. We had an invitation there. So we went out there and that’s where we spent our wedding night and of course the next day we’re off to Katoomba. I don’t know whether that happens to everybody. We’ve only ever had one wedding. We won’t have another one will we?

At Bankstown, no,

near Bankstown on the Bankstown line. Belmore.

Well you’d know what Sydney’s like on show weekend wouldn’t you?

I had everything organised and we had a lovely hotel, one of the top hotels in Newcastle, the Great Northern Hotel, and he got us to cancel that like a dill. Why did he do that to us? I’ve never been friendly with that fellow since. He might now be alive now. Is he still alive or dead? I don’t know but we didn’t hold the American society in high regard after

that. The story is you’ve got to rely on yourself in life haven’t you really.

A couple of lessons and that’s one of the ones we learned particularly when I had it all arranged. That didn’t sit too well.

Yes.

I don’t know what day it was. It would be Easter Saturday. Well,

what chance would you have?

Yes. The signal school was at Point Cook.

That’s right.

I don’t know. There was a vacancy up there and they just sent me. That was one thing they didn’t tell you about in the air force or the army I believe. They didn’t tell you when they were sending you or where they were sending you or how long you’d be there or anything like that. You just went. I got my movement orders, “Report to Darwin at a certain time”, and

they arranged the transport. I don’t know whether I got any leave. I may have but I don’t think so. They would have arranged the transport. I went by a Douglas DC3

to, I think I might have gone by train to Adelaide and from Adelaide I went by a Douglas from there up to a place called Birdham which is up in the Northern Territory. And from Birdham by troop train to Darwin.

At Darwin I had to report to the sigs office there and that’s where I started work. That’s how the system worked.

No. It didn’t even

enter my mind and I’m sure it didn’t enter mother’s mind. In all our lives there’s never been any doubts like that thank God and touch wood.

That’s been a very difficult subject. Occasionally, I was a terrible letter writer.

Probably both. I’m not a good letter writer even today even though I can write books no trouble at all. I don’t know whether when you write a letter it’s something personal because there’s nothing personal between you and your lover anyway.

I really don’t know but I suspect basically I’m a shy person I suppose. I don’t know. It took me six months to kiss her. Yes, six months, so I’m shy.

I got to a point where it was made known to

me that I didn’t write much so I sent her a twenty three page letter and I don’t know whether that helped at all. Did it? It took six weeks to write.

That’s right.

The climate more than anything else. It’s like this only worse, muggy. However, we all dressed for the occasion wearing shorts and a shirt and boots and that was about it. Darwin itself had really been bombed, bombed hard.

The main aerodrome RAAF Darwin had really been belted. There were areas there with buildings that had been totally destroyed and particularly the administration area that I had been working at in the sigs centre. We were open to the elements because it had all been

blown away. So for a newcomer it really looked as though the Japanese had done some real damage to it. I heard recently about that that the Japanese inflicted more damage on Darwin than they did on Pearl Harbour and there were quite a number of ships in the

harbour that were destroyed. They first gave out the information that there were twenty nine people killed in the first raid which of course wasn’t true. I think the figure was nearer three thousand than that. It must have been rather a shock to them to get a blitzing like they did. The one feature about Darwin I do remember was

there was a hotel there called the Vesty Hotel. It had a blue roof and you could see it from miles away. And the story goes the Japanese didn’t touch that one because they were going to use that for their headquarters and they didn’t want to destroy that. Whether there’s any truth in that I don’t know and I would wonder how they got that information or

whether it was just conjecture. I suspect that’s all it was. Maybe Vesty’s Hotel wasn’t important to them. I imagine the administration headquarters or the RAAF Darwin certainly would have been and to destroy that would have been their first objective. But it was still functioning and it was still working well when I was there.

Well so goes the

story that they were told to go, to go south, and some of them kept on going and they landed in Melbourne and places like that before they stopped running. A big panic and I imagine there would be. Anyhow there were dozens of people killed. I don’t remember a lot about the Darwin that I saw in those days. I went

back in 1970 on an Aboriginal tour I did and Darwin was a totally different place to what I remember during the war years. That would be thirty years later and you would expect that to happen wouldn’t you? Darwin had a

cosmopolitan population. I would think more so today than ever but it certainly had a fairly large Chinese population there. When I went there to Darwin in 1943 I didn’t see too many civilians there at all.

Later on when I came back from Gove, about a year later, the place had a lot of American servicemen there, hundreds and thousands of them probably. And they apparently were using Darwin as one of their major bases. But just the change in twelve months in Darwin

was quite remarkable but even so I wouldn’t hesitate to say that there were not many civilians there. They had pretty well all cleared out.

I was quartered in the RAAF Darwin itself. They had huts there and

so between the huts and the sigs quarters that’s where I to and froed. But it was only for a short period of time, it wasn’t long.

Only a matter of a few weeks if that.

I was operating and receiving and sending messages.

I don’t know. As I say, they’re not one for questions there. You don’t get any answers, they don’t tell you.

Well as a rookie maybe I wasn’t experienced enough for their purposes. I don’t know. I suspect that could have been a factor. Also I was sent to the 2nd Squadron. I was moved from Darwin to Number 2 Squadron for only a very short time and I’ve got a feeling it may have been for the very same

reason. I was still passed as proficient to do it but of course there’s a big gap between an experienced operator and one who is very new to it. It wasn’t very long and I was moved from 2 Squadron at Batchelor across to Yirrkala over on the Gove peninsula

and that’s where I stayed for quite a while. That was my longest stay in the air force anywhere as a matter of fact.

Darwin to 2 Squadron which was inland from Darwin it was a matter of, I wouldn’t know exactly, maybe a hundred miles but it couldn’t have been too far

inland. I remember going to a few picture nights there. I suppose you’ve heard about them have you from other servicemen.

Yes. There would be a truck going around saying, “Pictures are on tonight”, and everybody would pile one.

Particularly during the wet season you’d take your ground sheet. You’d take a kerosene tin with you or something like that and you’d sit on that. And then the pictures would come on and it would start to rain. So you’d wrap your ground sheet around you and you had your fur felt hat on. You didn’t get a

drop of rain on you. It was hard hearing what was going on on the screen because of the rain because in Darwin you used to get huge storms. They still get them there I suppose. These storms that we get here that they write up about they don’t know what a storm is like really. I think these tropical storms they get up there are something.

To sit on.

Or something like that, something light and easy to carry. There probably were benches scattered around the place. There could have been but I don’t remember. It was a fairly simple sort of thing. You wrapped your ground sheet around you and you

put your hat on and it could rain and you wouldn’t feel it. But anyway in Darwin when it was raining it didn’t matter much it was just a bit cooler that’s all. You soon dried off.

No. They would be the 1930s vintage I suppose.

No, they were entertainment. They would probably be the material that we get on Foxtel these days some of the old ones they show, the same sort of stuff. It was either that or sit in your tent and read a book or something.

There wasn’t a lot to entertain you.

No it didn’t quite honestly but I come from a teetotaller family. The story behind that is that my father had a hard life. His father was a coal miner who pretty well drank himself to death at the age of

forty odd which left Dad’s mother, my grandmother, in a pretty serious situation in those days. In 1904 he died and she had three or four children to care for. And I don’t think there were any widow’s pensions in those days and she had to rear this family on her own.

The way she did it was that she was a midwife and the town was Minmay which is about twenty or thirty miles from Newcastle in the coal sort of area just beyond a place called Wallsend. I suppose in a small town whether in

those days, I can only conjecture, there weren’t too many pills around to stop women getting pregnant so I’d imagine there’d be quite a lot of work for midwives to do. But anyway she reared a family doing things like that and maybe her skills were extended further than that to nursing.

I suspect so. This is one of the things I write about. In my foreword to this autobiography I don’t know a lot of information about my forebears. I’ve got some conjecture and some things that have been let

drop about my great grandparents and so on. Aunt Emma was a fund of a lot of information for that but she was a lady who was inclined to exaggerate too. My brother, elder brother, did a research

on our early history and traced right back as far as he could and he got back to 1819 to a marriage between a John Spencer and Mary Love. Apparently there was a good reason to believe

that’s where the Crofts started from but, you know, I’ve got the information from my brother who checked it through birth records and death records but about all that gives you is names and not much more.

Well, my daughter

Leigh is very interested in that kind of information. She’s got a lot of it. There’s good reason to believe that there’s something in it. Just up here, what you’ve got in the photographs are five generations of Crofts. And the same thing on the other side, starting off from our grandchildren, one, two, three, four, five.

Yes.

When you leave Darwin by plane you travel a fair distance and then you get on to the escarpment which is a raised

plateau type of situation and that’s where Arnhem Land starts from as I understand it. When you arrive at Gove the country is pretty wild going across it. In spite of very heavy rainfall I didn’t see any rain forest, the

same as you do around North Queensland. It may well be there as far as I know but I didn’t see any. Even at Yirrkala or Gove or Nhulunbuy, which I like to call it, the trees weren’t very tall and they weren’t very thick.

I really don’t know, there is a name for that kind of country. I can’t put a word to it now but there is a word. It’s not thick forestry type of country. The trees would be twenty, thirty, forty or fifty feet high, not big trees.

It showed signs of bush fires. You’d wonder why. There weren’t bush fires in the year I was there pretty well but there were signs of it. Most of it was put down to lightening strikes. You could get a lightening strike in the area

in the dry weather. However, because there wasn’t a lot of undergrowth as such it didn’t pose any danger to our damp or anything like that. Even so, I believe later that that is part of the Aboriginal culture to set fire to part of their land, a cleansing

sort of operation.

Not a lot of comparisons. The layout, there was a strip they were making for bombers.

They weren’t like strips that I’d struck later on at a place like Tarakan where they laid these long strips of metal and put them down in a day or two, a quick arrangement. The one at Gove as far as I can remember was made of bitumen and I suspect meant

to take the weight of heavy bombers and things like that. Some of these things you don’t think into deeply but afterwards you reckon that’s what they were there for. There was a strip they were working on and there was the camp itself. There would be several hundred men there and there was the sigs hut which was some distance away,

five or ten miles away, something like that, and that was entirely separate to the rest of the business there. The huts were composed of, pretty well open air, housing about thirty or forty men. They

were forty or fifty feet long by about twenty or thirty feet wide by about ten, fifteen feet high or something like that. There were large overhanging eaves on it so the air could circulate. Mind you that was probably the way to build a place in a hot climate where the air was allowed to come

up and circulate. The floor was composed of gravel and stuff. The accommodation was quite good. We had mosquito nets and we used to take Atebrin and stuff like that which we had to do on the islands. We also did much the same thing

around Darwin. I don’t know whether that was all that necessary because as far as I know there was no malaria in the top end. However, there were Dengue Fever there which was quite a nasty sort of thing to get.

Not as life threatening I believe as what malaria is. So we used to get that. Yes, we had to sleep with mosquito nets. Even in Darwin we had to do the same thing. It wasn’t so bad on a later trip in 1970 odd

where they used to go around and smoke the place or use this insecticide to kill all the mosquitos in the tent. But of course during the war we used mosquito nets. It could be quite interesting at times especially in Darwin where the fireflies used to get on your net and crawl up and down and you’d see these lights all over it.

Yes. For somebody coming from the southern areas and you see fireflies you wonder what it is.

The most interesting thing was the goannas. They were big monsters. I remember one of the

wireless operators decided to chase a goanna. He came back and he was all white and shaken. The thing had started to chase him and he didn’t think it was such a good idea then. Of course they grow about six or seven feet long. As far as I know they’re not aggressive

so I don’t know what he did to it. The goannas, the frilly necked lizards there were a lot of them around. There was a visit from some entomologist while I was there. And in that area where we were there was a large spider that used to go between trees.

It used to put its web between the trees. It was a bird catching spider apparently and that’s what they were up to have a look at, one of the peculiarities of the area. I didn’t fancy walking into one of those webs. There weren’t a lot of them but that’s what they were there for.

They would build a web,

how far? Between two trees about six foot apart or something like that. I don’t know how they caught the bird but that was their function. And that’s what the entomologist was there to have a look at. They were apparently a well known fact. Apart from that, what else? Heaps of ants,

particularly in Darwin the termites they were rather than ants, they weren’t really ants, they used to come out in their thousands at a certain time of the year, millions in fact. They’d fly and get to where they wanted to move to and they’d shed their wings

and then they’d start building a nest. Where we had tents we used to use a wooden framework for part of the tent structure. And the termites would get into those and you could hear them working away at night making a noise chewing into the wood.

I can’t describe it but it was a gnawing sound. As a matter of a fact any of those structures wouldn’t have lasted very long at the camp site because they were made of pretty well rough bush timber which was available there. And the termites would have eaten them shortly after we left or they were

working on our little tents. So you couldn’t count on those structures being permanent particularly the air force ones. I suspect that the people that lived there later on in the company towns wouldn’t have had such a thing as wooden structures they would have been all concrete.

That was a feature of it. The other thing is the occasional fishing trip. It was rather exciting. I got some fishing lines sent up to me from home and we’d borrow a truck and go to near the Catalina base

where they had a jetty and what we’d do is, under each jetty they had schools of these hardiheads. And you’d stick a bullet in amongst those and stun maybe twenty or thirty of them. We’d gather them and bait the hook up and then stick another bullet in amongst them and throw in our bait and the water would

boil and the fish would come out, the stunned ones. I was in cahoots with the cook so we had fresh fish. It was very nice fresh fish after living on bully beef. The only one trouble with the fishing expedition was that one day I hooked into a fourteen or fifteen foot

shark, a hammerhead shark, it went, “whoosh” and it snapped the line. It was attracted to the hardiheads too. It thought it would have a bit of something to eat. The other thing the fellows used to do and I don’t know where they got that from but they

used to put a grenade or a stick of geli in some of the water holes there and that would feed the whole camp because some huge fish used to come up there. I don’t know what kind they were but they’d probably be groper or something like that. But again that’s not a good

idea because a, it’s dangerous and b, the fish that you kill like that are all bruised and not very good to eat anyway. So I found catching them by hand line was the better way of doing it.

Almost. It would pulverise some of the anyway, the very large fish.

But I suppose people eat things like that if you’ve been living on a diet of bully beef done in various ways like with dehydrated potatoes on top of a whole half a dozen cans of bully beef. That’s the kind of stuff we had to eat.

You only ate mainly because you were hungry that’s all. It’s not like having three squares a day on it. When I went up there I weighed about twelve stone and when I came back I was about ten. You can’t say the food wasn’t nourishing, it was. But because it was always the same, the monotony of eating it and the

monotony where you were, there wasn’t much to do apart from get on the morse key and send, that was about the limit of what you did. And I told Elizabeth Richards that it was a very boring time there although I don’t doubt on reflection that the work we were doing was quite important and was quite vital to the whole situation.

If they didn’t have the sigs people there they couldn’t have functioned.

I didn’t have a clue, no. I didn’t have the faintest idea. I don’t know whether there would have been operational information there. I suppose there would have been.

If headquarters was planning an attack on Singapore there is certain things they’d have to tell them and the only way they could have told them is through the radio through code. And a lot of the information there would have been necessary kind of stuff. I don’t know. I can only conjecture that they’d know how many planes were required and what time to

go and where to go and what to hit, what was the target and all that kind of stuff. I didn’t have a clue about any of those things.

I don’t know whether it went directly to the Catalina base but we were about the only ones there that could do it so yes.

Pretty well, yes. All the sigs blokes stayed together in their own quarters. Initially I was in this very lage one I was telling you about and that was a mixture of a number of

different people. But later on we got into our own tent and they were all sigs people, yes, because it made sense as we worked together and so on. The sigs hut was some distance away from the main camp. The reason for that I

speculated on. The set up with the sigs arrangement was that there was a sigs and a cipher hut all together and there was a latrine of about one complete,

there were about three latrines in it. And connected to the sigs hut itself was a generator. One of the six blokes were given this job to do, one of us had to go down and refuel and you know do the necessary maintenance on it.

and running from the generator to the sigs hut was a cable, a power cable. One particularly bad storm that happened, not while I was on duty but it happened, a bolt of lightning hit the power cable

that ran up into the sigs hut and one of the fellows was operating like that and it went right up to his morse key and kicked his hand right off. It gave him one hell of a fright. He never got over that. They were the storms. Some of the things that we did get

there, the Aboriginals there weren’t encouraged to come near our camp. They used to go to our rubbish dump and raid the rubbish dump and they were told to clear out because of that. Of course that only encouraged disease because they ate some of the food that we threw out

and in that hot climate it would spoil very quickly and it wouldn’t be safe for them but nevertheless they still went there and did that. We got occasionally unofficial visits from them and they were friendly enough. They showed us their spearing powers and they were very accurate with their spears. They gave us a demonstration one day. The

spear would be about eight or ten feet long. They had a stick with a notch in it like that and the spear itself was kind of like a pole about an inch across. And the end of the pole there was a hollowed out section there. And the wooma fitted into the notch so they had the

spear like that and this thing backed up on it and of course that gave him an arm about 10 feet long and he’d get enormous power from it. They were very accurate. They’d throw it fifty or sixty feet away and lodge it in a little stump like that with no trouble at all. But of course if you missed the thing you were aiming at, an animal I take it or a

kangaroo or something like that you didn’t eat. It kind of encouraged you to be pretty accurate didn’t it? And also I suspect that even the little children were into this spear throwing business very early in the piece because it’s their way of surviving. That was about the only occasion we never had anything to

do with the Aborigines. They weren’t encouraged to come there.

I don’t know but the powers that be in the camp would have told them to clear out for very good reasons as you could understand. I don’t know whether they’d take much notice of it but you didn’t see much of them. There was,

I don’t know whether there was much at Gove but certainly at other Aboriginal areas there were welfare officers or control officers which were their liaison between them and the white society and maybe that’s who they’d get in touch with. I suspect that’s something where

the squadron leader would have said to that fellow who was communicating with them, “Look, it’s dangerous here, tell them to stay away”. And they might have taken that to the council of Aboriginals and said, “Look it’s too dangerous there, it’s poisonous, don’t go near it”. So we didn’t see much of them.

There would be about half a dozen operating points. There would be one air radio where we worked aircraft which was open most of the time, not necessarily worked, but open. And there were three, four, five

operating points to work with Darwin, mainly that’s where we worked. And there was quite a lot of traffic going between us and Darwin. Darwin was five hundred or maybe one thousand miles away or something like that. There were no roads.

Yes. They’d be operating on different frequencies. I don’t recall exactly where it was, it certainly was RAAF Darwin we were

working, but there could have been other points we could have been working too at the same time. I need to be corrected on that one, I’m not quite sure.

I don’t remember the Catalina base being operated although that could have been connected by land line and you’d use a telephone for that. The isolation wasn’t within the

Gove area itself the isolation was between the Gove Peninsula and the outside world and that’s where we came into affect.

No, there were four or five people working at the same time so it was quite a busy station. Of course don’t forget there’s a

cipher room as well for passing and receiving messages.

It was called an AR7 and what that means I don’t know but that’s what we’d call it. I can remember sitting on a table and it would be close to a metre high

and about that wide. It was a fairly big piece of machinery and I would imagine it would be quite expensive too. I can remember about that too that if we wanted to change frequency we used to pull out this quite large box which resonated on a certain frequency so we could

change it and that was part of the equipment as well. If we wanted to change frequencies we’d pull out this container, it would be five, six or seven inches or two inches by about six inches. So it was a large square box and we’d pull it out and insert another one in its place.

Yes, that’s probably the way it worked well it would be the way it worked. It gave us a different frequency. I don’t know the function of it. I knew the function of it but I don’t know the mechanism and what it did exactly but it did change frequency. So when we had to change frequency that’s what we did.

Yes, just Morse Code. The only exception to that was the air radio one where we could work with planes and that was a specialist area that we didn’t get on to very often. We didn’t use it very often there were special operators for that.

There weren’t any Americans where we were, not initially. There might have been later on after I left there but there weren’t at Gove itself even the Catalinas there as far as I know. We used to see the Catalina pilots occasionally but they would be Australians. So the chances are it would be an Australian squadron I would think. I don’t know for

sure but I would think so. It’s getting into an area I didn’t see much or do much with.

No, not at all. It was absolutely quiet

and I don’t know why. Maybe the Japs had so much on their hands with the Americans in that 1943 period and later on that they had too much on their hands to worry about attacking Australia because as soon as they had to fight for their lives in the islands they weren’t trying to attack Australia at all.

I think they were trying to fight for survival in a lot of places.

No we didn’t really. We didn’t get a lot of information. We were pretty well isolated from anybody there. And that was part of the reason for the boredom. We didn’t have a

clue what was happening.

The boredom, yes, and the isolation. You’re there and you do your job and that’s about it. About all we were left with - there was a fair bit of gambling done but I’d only

left myself about two and six a day to live on which is not a lot of money so I don’t know whether I could have done a lot of gambling. There were a few amusements and that’s all there was. There were very few pictures there that I can remember.

We did have one visit from a female troupe. We had to clean the camp up because what they had spread out over the camp for hygiene purposes were galvanised iron pipes stuck into the ground

and there was a funnel on top and the fellows used to urinate in them. They used to call them pissaphones. I haven’t heard that word for years. But they had to cover them up when the ladies came. I don’t know what they did but they weren’t there more than a day or two so I suppose it worked out.

Hold on to it. We did have latrines but of course it’s not a really good idea to use a latrine for that purpose is it? We probably had to keep our eyes open that’s all. That’s the beauty of a single sex camp.

Nothing much that I can remember really. Around Darwin there were pictures nearly every night and we went to see there. There were heaps of trucks going to the pictures theatre and you’d only have to stand out on the road and hop on a truck and they’d take you there no problems. As I was telling

Heather you had your fur felt hat and something to sit on and your ground sheet and that’s all you needed. I don’t recall too much of that in Gove. I don’t think there was any because it was so far away.

There’d be quite a fair selection of them from what I can recall of them. But that only occurred that I can remember around Darwin itself and that was only for a month or two but certainly I don’t remember any at all over in Gove.

I didn’t see them as a matter of fact I had to work. That was a bit of a nuisance but they were only there one night. I tell you what made the biggest furore in the camp was the time they got a batch of hens’ eggs. The fellows went

crazy over them and everyone had to have one. The things you would crave for.

A hen’s egg. “They’re on tonight, we’ve got eggs”. Because most of the eggs we got were dehydrated and tasted awful but it was nourishing. I can remember one of my mates was in

the army and he worked in the telephone office after the war. That’s where I met him. He said, “I was so hungry once in New Guinea I had a tin of bully beef and I really enjoyed it”. I eat bully beef here now and it’s the same tin really and it’s nice, you get to like it.

No, singly.

Yes. I haven’t got a great memory of a lot of them.

There was one fellow up in Morotai who had a dreadful accident. We used to wash our clothes by using what we called a choofer. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of those? It was quite a dangerous gadget.

It consisted of a petrol tin say about a four litre size. Running from the base of the petrol tin was a tube and connected into the tube was a little tap arrangement which allowed a thin stream of petrol to come out of it. And that was attached to a

stand arrangement. On top of the stand itself we used to put a kerosene tin and in the tin we’d put our clothes and soap and things like that and we’d light the choofer by a match. It used to make that funny sound because the petrol would squirt out, “Choof, choof, choof”, and it would make that sound like a choofer and hence the name.

Poor old Jimmy Diamond was one of our sigs blokes who had been quite a well known motor bike racer pre war. He had got leave to return home because of marital problems. And he was watching his clothes and the

choofer wasn’t very effective and the petrol ran right back into the can and exploded all over him, terrible burns he had. And in those days, he got through because he was a pretty healthy bloke, he got through the critical period of the burns on his body and the pain but about two weeks later the shock hit his system and killed him.

So poor old Jim. It wasn’t a very happy homecoming for him. They are the kind of things that happened.

No. It didn’t happen that way. I was sent home on leave and that was in March ’45

and that’s when I did the deed and got married and went on honeymoon. I was stationed at a camp where there were lots and lots of air force people. The object of it was they were gathering a group of people

to send on because the European war was over and the idea was to invade Japan and finish Japan off. So two or three thousand of us were all piled on to a troop ship here in Brisbane. We didn’t know where we were

going but any rate that’s where we landed, in Morotai. You can see on the map that it’s not very far from the Philippines. You know the Philippines come down like that Morotai is an island below that. So we were poised ready to go further afield. I wasn’t impressed with Morotai at all

but then I wasn’t there to get impressed at all. But in Morotai itself there was an American Negro division, the 91st I think it was, and they were holding the Japanese or they were fighting them. I don’t think they were all that concerned about wiping the Japanese that were there. The

American strategy during the war was to isolate the Japanese and leave them where they were and let them starve themselves out of whatever. So it cancelled them out in effect. That, as I understood it, was the situation. In the meantime, we were at a staging camp and we were based there ready to go further on to be allotted squadrons or

whatever to other headquarters further on. I was there about, I don’t know exactly, about a month or so. It was a dreadful place. The place was all in mud, acres of it. I remember one particular spot there was a truck bogged in

the mud and they sent another bigger truck to pull it out and it got bogged. So they finished up having to send a vehicle with tracks on it to pull it out, something like a very big bulldozer. That was everywhere and that’s when I was telling you about my friend Jimmy

Diamond who got burned. Trying to keep your clothes clean there, he was going home and trying to get the mud off and wash himself and all that. That’s what it was like right through it. That’s my memory of it. It wasn’t very pleasant at all. One of the

wireless operators there got into the black market trade with the Negros. That’s a no no that word, Negro.

They are too, just an aside from that. They had “The Dam Busters” on the other night. Did you see it?

Well the dog owned by squadron leader whatever his name is was called “Nigger” and it was bleeped out in America. You can’t use the word “Nigger”. That’s why there’s this stupidity

here with Nigger Brown in Toowoomba. One of the wireless operator mates of mine got into the black market. He was going quite well. What he was doing, we all had a ration of two bottles per beer per week. I’m a non drinker so he could have my beer. And my mate next door was a non drinker too so he could have his beer.

And he got on to a few fellows like that and went over to the American camp. “Oh yeah, we’ll buy it mate”. And they bought it at about twice the price that we had to pay or more because they were loaded with money. And so it went on. With the money he got from the American Negros he

bought some more beer and passed it on and built up a bit of a bank. He got up to the stage of going to the Sergeants’ Mess or the Officers’ Mess and buying whisky. That was worth a lot of money. So he went to this camp and he

said, “I’ve got a bottle of whisky now mate and I can get plenty more. How much will you give me for it?” I don’t know how much money it was but that was quite a lot of money. That was a drink that they wanted. You wouldn’t think an intelligent man would fall for it. “Give us your bottle mate.

I know a bloke that’s really loaded and would give me any amount of money for this”. And he handed it over and that’s the last he saw of his whisky or the two fellows. They took the lot. So after all this to-ing and fro-ing and building up a bank and bargaining with people and all that the fellow pinched it and took it. I suppose they had a very good drink that

night. It was gone. There was no more whisky. So the black market is a good place to stay away from. I didn’t get self-righteous about it at all. I didn’t say, “You’re a mug”, or anything like that. I just held my tongue. Incidentally, that fellow later on became a politician and I thought, “Well, that’s how they operate some of them don’t they?”

Yes, well maybe he learned a lesson.

Not at all, no. I lived a pretty isolated, protected life. In lots of ways, thank God for that because never, ever saw

first hand the abominations of war. And I think war is an abomination I really do. I never saw any of that. I was spared all that. I didn’t fire a shot or anything like that. I didn’t have a shot fired at me. The bombing raids as such if you could call it that, there was a flight of Japanese

bombers going overhead and they didn’t even bomb us thank god. They were going to a target further on. So that’s the nearest thing. Actually, the nearest thing I came to it was at Newcastle in the telephone exchange as a telephonist.

Not until afterwards. Not that I can remember.

Pretty well or marching, holding time, marching time, that’s all. We knew we were going further on and we knew this was only a staging camp. I thank god that it didn’t go any further because I’m quite sure the Japanese nation would have fought until the last one. That’s how fanatical

they are. And that’s understandable. We would have done the same thing here I hope. That’s the kind of future we were facing. So, you know, you get the people that say dropping the atom bomb was a foul, terrible thing to do. And it was

no argument. I don’t think anybody could pose an argument that it was. But I think as Trumann said the Japanese would have fought desperately and that would have cost the American nation hundreds and thousands of their own soldiers to do it. And I suppose at the same time there would have been millions of Japanese citizens killed too at the same time.

Whether you can mount an argument that dropping the bomb was a good thing I don’t think so. But from my point of view the war was over and that was something. I would suspect that surely the Japanese people would have thought the same thing. “It’s all over”. And the soldiers would have,

“It’s finished”. I think it was more a sense of relief than anything else that it was finished and it was over and we didn’t have to go any further than where we were.

We weren’t told anything and

that’s my experience in the air force. We were never asked.

I suspect most ex-servicemen would say the same thing. They were never consulted because it wasn’t within our scope of activity to say “I don’t want to go there”. You go where you’re sent.

You can question the morality of it I suppose in that once you join in an armed force the nature of the thing is that you have no say where you go or for that matter what you do.

No, not really. Wireless operators could be sent anywhere, skilful ones. And I’d been a wireless operator for two or three years and I was as good as any wireless operator around. I could have been attached to a

squadron or operation unit, anywhere. They would have used me wherever they had the need I suppose.

The Australians were grouped together. We were grouped

as wireless operators together in the one area. I don’t know how extensive the area was and how many people were there. All I know is that it was a staging camp and that there were two thousand of us on a troop ship, two or three thousand for that matter and we were all landed in the same spot. So it must have been fairly large and fairly extensive.

No, it was an American one, and I forget it. The only one that comes to mind is the Kanimbla where I went from Morotai on to Tarakan.

I can’t remember exactly. It would be a number of weeks, more than a month, it could have been a couple of

months. I’m not quite sure now.

No. I was in a staging camp which is worse in a way because you’re not doing anything at all only trying to run the black market which wasn’t a good idea at all.

No there was nothing there. I tried that.

Plenty of mud.

Well Tarakan was a bit more interesting in a way. The sigs hut this time was placed on the air strip right about in the middle of it somewhere. And the airstrip had only been constructed quickly. It was one of those composed

of large strips of steel. I don’t know how to describe them exactly. They had holes in them, maybe a strip say I wouldn’t know, say it was fifty feet long by about fifty feet wide, with every ten feet a

circular hole like that. Now what used to happen at Tarakan was the strip used to rise and fall with the tide. It was a very difficult place to land Spitfires and things like that because Spitfires only had a fairly narrow wheel base and from what I heard from people that flew them it was a very dodgy thing to land it on a strip that was up and down like that on a metal

foundation. We had Beaufighters which were there. They seemed to have a broader wheel base and seemed to handle it all right. Our tent was placed at the end of the strip. It wasn’t a very safe place to have one because one Beaufighter overshot the

strip and nearly collected our tent which wasn’t really encouraging. We got the wanders one day and a mate and I went walking around the bush part of the area there. And

we came across a hut. I’ll never forget the smell of it. It had a quite peculiar odour. My wife used to describe the smell, she’d call it the smell of death. I suspected there had been quite a violent scuffle there at some stage.

But that I didn’t know I was only conjecturing about that. But I think Tarakan might have had some bloody awful tales to tell. Tarakan itself would have been quite valuable to the Japanese because it was oil rich. So rich that at the end of the strip where we were

there was a little creek running past and the oil was seeping out of the ground there at that place. So oil would have been a major prize for the Japanese. Although after the war was over of course I believe the odd Japanese had melded into their community there.

Had been accepted and was living with them. I don’t know how they found that out.

Just operate on the wireless that’s all and send messages and receive messages. There had to be a lot of clearing up

done and there were hundreds of trucks parked beside the air strip. They had to be disposed of in some way and many of them had only a couple of hundred miles on their clock, virtually brand new.

Well they were there by Lend Lease and a lot of them were taken out to sea and

dumped which was a blinking great waste wasn’t it. But they had to have their reasons for it. I suppose you’ve got to say that for the American truck industry alone if they gave hundreds of trucks away who’s going to buy them and who’s going to buy the

new ones. I don’t know the moral in that. Mind you, that’s one of the periodic things about war isn’t it? I don’t know whatever happened to the trucks themselves but I heard that quite a number of them were, because of the Lend Lease arrangement, they couldn’t be brought back to Australia and they had to be

dumped at sea.

Yes.

Yes they were owned by America. Apparently the Lend Lease operation worked that way during the war years. Australia really couldn’t afford to buy all those things so that was the condition. We’ll give you this truck to use during the war

but you don’t own them. We own them. And if we determine that we want to dump them at sea so be it. That’s the way it will go. I don’t know. I’ve never looked all that closely into it but I suppose that will be a subject for somebody now that it’s fifty years later. But what kind of morality was that in there and could the Americans have given

it to some other nation like the new one, Indonesia, who were struggling and could really have used them. And after all that was said and done they were no good to Americans. And they weren’t about to give them to the Australians because their market in Australia would decrease by the thousands of trucks that they had. We could have used them on our land, yes. But again they are the things

that are not determined by LAC [leading aircraftsman] Group 1 Wireless Operators.

Good idea.

No, Morotai.

Yes I think I mentioned before that a couple of enterprising air force men

blew up all the latrines. I made a statement, and I’ve made it in my book, that what an appropriate way to end a war. But mind you I might have a funny sense of humour.

I didn’t think much of war. Apart from the boredom which I think God smiled on me really

keeping me away from the shooting end of it but friends of mine went through some rotten times. One was a POW [prisoner of war] in Japan. Another mate of mine was in Changi. Yes, they went through it.

Yes.

Oh yes. I don’t know whether I replied to it. I suppose I would have. She’ll tell you. I don’t know whether she’s still got the letter there. You know what women are like, they hang on to letters don’t they?

Watch out for that Chris. Watch out what you write mate.

Yes. It was the best news I had all during the war years as a matter of fact. Yes, it was lovely and I couldn’t wait to get home.

No, I had no intention of staying on. Not for one moment longer than I had to. I couldn’t see any future for me in the air force. Indeed I don’t think they would want me at any road. Not that I couldn’t

perform whatever they wanted me to do. I could have done it. But I think deep down I didn’t like the idea or not knowing where you were going and not knowing how long you’d be there, the control of your life. That’s what happens to people who join the armed forces, their control is not there, they are

gone. And if you think about it, it has to be. You can’t run any kind of military operation unless you have some form of order and some form of discipline. You must have those otherwise you’re a rabble aren’t you? No, I didn’t see my future there. I did get an offer when I was discharged, they had no chance though.

There was a police officer there looking out for fellows of a certain height, “Would you like to join the police force mate?” I said, “No thank you”. Because I would think there would be a similar sort of discipline in the police force too. Although I do have a police connection, my grandfather was a police inspector when he died.

And I haven’t had any desire to change over to that form of discipline at all.

No. Not really, no. I was only sending and receiving Morse again except for that little joke I had with the “diddly dit” operator that was trying to send two hundred words a minute. No, that shows you what sort of state of mind you got into

when you were isolated, as we were, and you were in a country you didn’t want to be in and in a climate I didn’t think much of because you used to get tremendous electrical storms there. Tarakan is an island only two or three miles off the coast of Borneo and coming right down to the coast line are these quite high

mountains. And you can see the storms building up and coming towards you.

It was all encoded. I had no idea what was contained in them.

Even when the war was over the coding system still applied. There was no plain language used at all. I don’t know whether we would have been able to use plain language. They used the encoded system all the time. The only time plain language was allowed was on a land line where it was confined between

one point and the other.

Not with a wife that was expecting a child back in Newcastle, no way. A few fellows were tempted to join the occupation forces. As it turned

out had I done so I would have missed out on a lot of opportunities in the public service for promotion because I would have lost the opportunity to get the skills needed to become a good public servant. After the war that’s one of the things I started. That’s one of the

concessions they gave to returned soldiers. If they had certain levels of education they could be promoted to the Third Division. I don’t know if you know the structures in the public service. The basic

public service position was called the Fourth Division, I’m talking about clerical positions, the fourth division clerical position. And at that level you needed education to about junior level. The next level up was senior level and that was called the Third Division.

The Third Division was up to matriculation level and one of the things they did allow you was if your level was Fourth Division or the equivalent with intermediate or the state level here, the junior, was to move up one grade because they

needed so many of them. So that’s where I started. Now the Third Division is by far the most important one because it allows public servants to move from one level, the bottom level of the Third Division, up to very

senior level which goes up to about twelfth level. On the twelfth level you are pretty well in charge of the state. I started back in the district telephone officer. I was a contract clerk, a Third Division contract

clerk. Now that was on the contract clerk, the bottom of the section of the Third Division. There were levels of promotion in the telephone office beyond the basic third division level. However in

the electoral office, which I became interested in, the pyramid of promotion was like that. In most public service the pyramid is like that. So the first promotion you would get would be divisional clerk which would be on the Fourth Level of

Third Division. The level above that was the Division of Returning Officer. There were only one hundred and twenty four of those in the state when I joined it. There are more than that now. There’s one for every division and that’s on the sixth level. Now on the seventh or eighth level you get in charge of a state. That’s

why the promotions were like that. So if you picked a department where they had a lot of base range clerks moving up to the first base range, the one above it, is an enormous task. And not only have you got to be a super brain but you’ve got to be in there a long time. You’ve got to let the years slide by. I couldn’t see myself

allowing that sort of time level to pass. So that’s where I headed for because there were only three steps, Division Clerk to Returning Officer to in charge of the state three levels. Mind you, for every CEO [chief executive officer] in charge of the state, and there’s only one of those,

and there are only six of them throughout Australia, so there weren’t very many. And the next level above that is in charge of Australia. So if you had the ability or your timing was right one in a thousand chances you had. I told my clerk in Dolby

years ago that I knew the steps to promotion and I knew the way to go but I wasn’t prepared to do it was to become a clerk in the Brisbane office. A clerk in the Brisbane office would get experience in the head office which is in the same building. Do your spell

over time and from there on work your way to being senior clerk in head office and from there on the next step up was in charge of the state. That’s exactly what he did do. But he was prepared to do it and I wasn’t.

I wasn’t ambitious enough.

I had family responsibilities. I considered that the function I was doing as Returning Officer was a pretty important one and I got satisfaction from doing it. I don’t know whether you can put a lot on to job satisfaction. I think you can. I think it’s probably a lot more important than anything else.

It didn’t quite work out in my time because I got a nervous breakdown out of it but that’s another story anyway.

It had a lot of things in it. But it’s a long story to tell.

A number of factors, let’s see. Are you interested in that?

How far have I gone with the Returning Officer. I’ll give you the foreground to it first. After the war I came back as a Contract Clerk in the Third Division in the District Telephone Office at Newcastle.

It was an absolutely rotten job. Not that there was anything wrong with the office or the work systems or anything like that but it so happened that the job I got was Priority Officer for the allocation of telephones particularly to returned servicemen. However, there were more than returned servicemen involved because every

telephone that was applied for I had to allocate a priority to them. You can just imagine the kind of stress that was generated by an ex-serviceman who’d been a plumber, or wanted to be a plumber, or had been a taxi driver or wanted to follow any sort of

job that required communication by telephone so they could get work. They were desperate. So they were given a reasonably high priority. They were given a priority greater than what a businessman could have got for a telephone but they weren’t given a top priority. And there were cases turning up where you were an

ex serviceman, plumber, and somebody in the next street who wasn’t an ex serviceman had got a telephone and he’d only put in for the phone a month ago. And here you had been waiting six months and you were going broke because you couldn’t do your job. And of course I had to explain

why. I had to go through engineers to find out reasons for things like that and quite often it just as simple as the telephone cable doesn’t go to your house. It goes to somebody else’s house and in that area one person can be served by that and there’s no reason to stop him getting a telephone. We can’t give you one because you haven’t got a cable there so you’ll have to wait until they build it.

Anyway, that was the kind of explanation I had to go through. And as well as that there were allegations about corruption and things like that. In one particular case I can remember a politician had top priority, because politicians do get top priority understandably. And he fiddled it in a way that he’d

moved his house from one place to another and he let his telephone remain where it was and gave it to the incoming person that bought the house. He used his top priority to get the telephone at another place instead of removing it from out of the other place. There were all kinds of noises made about that about the man who allocates these telephones is

corrupt. You know, it went right through parliament and all that. I was called in to the telephone manager’s office to explain why. I said, “Yes, that’s true, there’s been corruption there and there’s no question of that”. He said, “Let me write that up”, and I said, “Yes, my pleasure”. So

I didn’t hear any more about that. But that’s the kind of stress that I was under. And as I said it was a rotten job because I wanted to see everybody, particularly ex servicemen, get their phones because I knew the poor beggars had to get it to survive. Anyway, after two or three years in that situation this,

virtually a sideways move came to the position of Electoral Clerk, Assistant to the Divisional Returning Officer. And I applied for it and I got it. I was explaining earlier that the

pyramid of promotion in the electoral office was like that, it was a pyramid, instead of like that in many other departments. The proposition of getting a fairly quick promotion was reasonable. And that happened in a matter of five, six years. I could mention the stress I was under

immediately in the Electoral Office. It wasn’t a bed of roses either because as soon as I walked into the job in Newcastle which was the largest iron workers union in Australia we were given the job of conducting an iron-workers ballot which had been ruled invalid by the court. The previous election had been ruled

invalid and I had to check eleven thousand entries for iron workers. My boss had to, Frank Yates was his name, had to write out to all these iron workers and send them

ballot papers having checked that all their credentials were right. And talk about spies, they were hiding behind doors because we used to take the ballot papers around to the local bank and put it in their bank vault. It was a very hairy kind of election and we only had primitive tools to do it. We weren’t given any typists. We had to write out every one of these

envelopes to these people. We had to be absolutely correct that we didn’t send it to the wrong address because that would have been headlines in the paper. And in the envelope we had to send them a ballot paper. And we had to make sure we sent not two or three ballot papers but one to each person and so on. So it was quite a tricky job. Quite onerous and quite stressful. That was my introduction, my first period of

stress in the Electoral Office. And that was only one of many. But the worst by far was the one that happened in 1972. I mentioned earlier that I’d volunteered, or I was selected as well, to do an Aboriginal tour through the top end. It was broken up into the top end and the

bottom end around Alice Springs. I was selected to do that Aboriginal tour to acquaint the Aboriginals with their voting rights which we did. It took a month to do and it was quite tiring. We had to do two lectures a day.

Some of the places were several hundred miles apart. You can imagine in the Northern Territory is one of the largest areas, it’s a state now isn’t it? In Australia. I wouldn’t know exactly how big it is but it is up with Queensland at any rate in size. Anyway, be that as it may, I did the

lecture tour in something like the heat we are getting now. It was hot and clammy. The Aboriginals I found were splendid people. I was quite impressed with their society and the way they love little kids. That’s what bringing up children is about, loving them. And as far as I’m concerned that’s the

most forgiving things about relationships to children. However, at the end of it I was almost exhausted. And to make it worse the division of the Northern Territory had been neglected. There’s a long story in that which is another reason why the fellow that had been the Returning Officer

before had a nervous breakdown. He was one of my great fishing mates but that’s another story. He had neglected to get a lot of people on to the electoral role so they could vote. I was asked to go, of course I was asked in such a way that couldn’t be refused, I was asked to go over to

Gove and another electoral officer was with me. And we went right through three thousand odd houses I think or a lot of them anyway in Gove to see that the people there were on the electoral role. We did it all in a day and at a temperature around one hundred degrees.

It just about did me in but I got the job done and I returned to Brisbane. When I got home here I was absolutely done in. And I contacted the State Electoral Officer, my immediate boss, and told him I wanted some

time off because I was tired, well, buggered I’d say was the right word. He said, “No, I can’t give you time off”. I said, “Why?” He said, “I just can’t give you time off”. So I said, “Well, I’ll take time without pay and you can’t refuse me that”.

In the meantime I got a letter from the Chief Electoral Office telling us what a good job we’d done and what a splendid lot of chappies we were which was pretty hollow considering that’s the way his lieutenant was going to treat one of his fellows that had gone over there. And done that didn’t stick very well with a Croft who doesn’t like getting treated this way. Anyway, that’s how the election started. A very tough

election and it got to the point when it was polling day. The votes were counted and they turned out to be almost level and it looked like at one stage I was going to be the Returning Officer, I hadn’t had a vote. As a returning officer I never placed a vote because I always held in reserve the ability to

do what I was about to do. And that was make a casting vote for whoever was going to be the next member. And boy, twenty four scrutineers at one time were in the office checking every single thing I did. I did a recount. I had to go through every ballot paper, fifty four thousand six hundred or something like that. And check every one and make

sure they were right. All the polling places had sent their ballot papers in to my office for me to check which I did. And at the same time there were these heaps of experienced scrutineers, some of them were members of parliament. One particular man was

Senator George George. He was a top level man and there was another level man, another politician. And they were doing their job. I’ve got nothing against them but it was very, very stressful. They challenged every vote they could. In the wash out, in the

end I didn’t have to make a casting vote although the newspapers made a lot of it that it was possible. And it’s a great long script I’ve got in that life story. And all the ballot papers that were challenged, there were some five hundred of them, were sent in to the State Electoral Officer to see whether they were valid votes

or not. And after he’d gone right through them, instead of having to make the casting votes, out of nearly fifty five thousand votes it finished up there was only thirty five difference. At one stage while doing the recount I worked thirty six hours straight in that kind of work and that’s stressful work. And that’s one of the things I traced back to the break down. But it took another year or

two to do it because the fellow that refused me, what he did, I had an experienced clerk with me and he took him away to work in head office and left me with several new people who didn’t know a thing about public service and put them in to take his place. Now, somebody off the street virtually

can’t replace an experienced bloke doing that sort of work. And that’s when I struggled through. The next year I had to clean up the election for starters. And the cleaning up is like doing an audit for everybody that had a vote. You’ve got to check them all off against a master and it’s an enormous job. That’s the sort of task

I had. I had to check them all off. That’s normal electoral procedure and there’s a lot of work involved in it. Then I had to do another one which was a senate election which I virtually did on my own because I had these inexperienced people working with me. A senate election, as far as a returning officer is concerned, is a fairly simple matter because what you miss out of that is the politicking that goes on,

what we’re experiencing right now. So that was out of the way. And then the very next thing that happened to me is that the Prime Minister sticks on a double dissolution which happened in 1974. I’m walking on my heels at this time. There were some signs there that I was about to crack up because I was getting

attacks of hysteria. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a nervous breakdown or heard about it but that was a situation I was getting, giggles and things like that. I didn’t tell anybody about it. I should have but I didn’t. Then the double dissolution comes along and that was a giant election. Instead of having twenty candidates for the senate it was

something like fifty. And instead of having half a dozen candidates for the House of Reps, I had ten or something like that. But on top of that Gough put on a referendum, four referenda. So double dissolution, it includes the senate, a full senate vote,

a house of reps election and four referenda. I couldn’t cope with it. I cracked up. The memory of it is still bad. I collapsed next door.

It’s painful. I’ll have a drink of water. I collapsed next door and she called the doctor. I don’t know what it was, catatonic or something like that. And he brought me out of it.

And Mum, my wife, was a teacher over at the school at that time and she came around about the time the doctor arrived and I finished up, I couldn’t walk straight. I was like a drunk. And I got put into Belmont Private Hospital. The psychiatrist there

filled me full of Valium and some other stuff about as powerful as that. And I finished up and I was out of this world. I’ve got recorded the pictures of what I looked like. I looked like an old man. I

went back to work. I was given three or four months away from work and it didn’t have any material affect. The psychiatrist sent me back to work but the damage had been done and I’d lost all confidence in my ability to do the job. In the end he diagnosed me as anxiety depression. I felt rotten about myself.

Depression is like a blanket. You’re certainly out of your mind. I tried to work again. I went back to work and I could only take it another two or three months. Finally, you know, I was

troubled by feelings of self destruction. I knew if I stayed in the job that would be my end. So when the psychiatrist said, “Do you want to give up the job?” I said, “Yes”.

And that’s it. I gave up the job.

Well that was 1975. Mother had a horrible time. A lot of these things are buried down deep.

But I learned to avoid stress as much as I could. We had a bit over Christmas and I went back, nowhere near as bad as the other, but to the wonky stage where I couldn’t walk straight. But we knew what was happening and we knew why it was happening. When it comes on like that you don’t know what’s happening to you.

And I can understand why people top themselves. I really can. I believe I was a pretty good officer. And people used to watch for the division I was in because they were some of the first figures out, the results they were. All the people that

studied politics could make a judgement from early results which came from me. And I had a good team. I had a great team of people working for me. Yes, that was a horrible time in our life.

Oh yes, very much

so.

Well, the positive things that have come out of it is that I’ve learned not ever to place myself in a position where I can get over stressed and to certainly think positively about things as far as I could. Remember what I said about positivity early and negativity. Negativity leads to all sorts

of bad things that can happen to you. Positivity, yes, that’s the track to take. But since then, thirty years, they’ve been a happy thirty years. I used to do some strange things because this depression continued for, what the psychiatrist said was it was a depression, and

anxiety depression which develops in his view takes as long to cure as it does to come on you. So I was under about I think the worst ten years in the electoral history. And again, that’s another thing I’ve written about because winding up an election takes over a year. It takes a year or eighteen months to do it

properly. But what they did to us in the 1960s is that they used to put on a controlling census. We were the census enumerators and it was our job in each division to count every head in our division. It was our responsibility to do that. And it was really census work not an electoral officer’s job. The electoral

office was something that was there to run an election not to count population. So between elections, which in 1961 got off kilter, but prior to 1961 elections were held every three years which gave you enough time

to assess what he situation is in each division. Where the population growth is and how many ballot papers were required in certain places so everybody would get a ballot and that kind of thing. Three years was a great time to do it. You could plan it and plan it perfectly. But when they stuck an election in two out of every three years and the third year they put on a census as well it’s no

wonder that twenty seven of the ROs [returning officer] out of one hundred and twenty four had to retire after the 1974 election.

And the fellow that wouldn’t give me the time off made a public statement in the papers. I’ve got it recorded there, that the electoral

officers were falling like dead flies or something with fatigue and stress and things like that. Hopefully they might have learned something from the 1974 election. I don’t hear of that kind of thing happening today and thank God because they lost quite a number of pretty good officers.

They were asking the impossible. But what fixed me I think was the close election in 1972 and the fact that I was virtually left on my own to cope with it. As far as the paper figures were concerned, yes, I had two people working in the office, me and somebody else working,

but you can’t pull strangers in and expect them to do complicated public service work. The public service I worked in, we had our own special jargon and you have to learn that language in itself by itself. And if you let a stranger have a go at it they can’t understand. So what do you do? You do it yourself and that’s what happened.

They wouldn’t take it today that kind of activity and neither they should either.

It’s always been a big part of my life.

I’ve come to the point in life where I don’t tend to judge people that much. People are people and one way my wife and I have a way of saying it is, “We’ve got warts, all of us”.

We’ve got warts.

In other words nobody is perfect. I’ve learned to be a bit more tolerant. Yes, I think I’m a stronger person for it. I would never, ever go through that kind of situation again and, as I say, I try as far as I can to avoid stressful situations. I’ve succeeded

by and large and when I do get in stressful situations I’m of no use anyway.

How can I say it.

Really what strengthened my faith more than anything was a near death incident that I had fourteen years ago. How can I put it? I went into Tarrawanna hospital for a

gall bladder operation and it was supposed to be a simple one, a routine one. The surgeon said three or four days and you’ll be out”. It wasn’t four days, it was twenty days and I nearly died.

The surgeon saw that the gall stone had gone behind in the tract there, the bile tract that goes into your stomach area, and he was very worried about it. And he did all sorts of things that only made it a lot worse. In reality what had happened was that I had developed,

I take it probably the cause of that was stress, I had developed duodenal ulcers and there were five large ones in there. The result was I couldn’t keep any food down. And I weighed one hundred kilos and I was down to eighty odd. Twenty kilos, that’s a lot of fat to lose. My legs were pretty skinny.

During that period there was a verse from the bible that had come into my mind right from my mind, “They will walk through the valley of the shadow of death and I will fear no evil. My rod and my staff will comfort me”. And in one particular case on about the twentieth

day I had a vision that I was going down a kind of a tunnel and four people came up to me and said, “You can come with me and leave all your troubles behind”. And I said, “No, I’ll go back”.

I believe I could have died then. And ever since then I’ve had a feeling of calmness and of comfort. In fact if I was to die right now that’s okay. I know that God cares for me and God loves me. And that’s the thing that strengthened my faith fourteen years ago.

And that’s half the reason I write the books I write because they’re based on comfort and understanding people and not being too judgemental on others because we all have warts. So I keep on writing that stuff. But, you know, my connection with my god and things like

that go back a long way. And I think the road through life is not smooth. It never has been. It has its rough patches. It has got its uphills and its down dales. At eighty one I’ve reached that conclusion and I find that if I write these things it’s a comfort to me. I get just as much comfort out of reading those things than people that I’ve given it to

and they get I would think strength from it. At least that’s what some of them have written and told me that it had helped them a lot.

Well, I don’t know about other religion, Islamic and all that kind of stuff. I don’t know. I really don’t. All I know is that God loves me and God loves you and that ought to be enough for all of us to get by.

As I was telling Heather earlier, this business in Ireland and places like that it upsets me because we’re certainly not made to kill each other. We’re made to love each other. I started preaching many, many

years ago in a church. And I wasn’t much of a preacher I’ll admit that. But the message always has been God’s love to us and always will be. I think if you stay in that area and he requires us to do the same thing. If we all live by that then it would be a different world. It would be.

And things like greed and things like that, pride, they upset me. I wonder whether the greed that I see around me, the hatred, racism,

whether that will ever be the Australian way of doing things. I don’t think it is or I hope to god it isn’t ever.

My pleasure.