Australians at War Film Archive

Marrickville, Sydney.

You’re running?

Okay. I was born in Walmer Private Hospital Marrickville, Sydney, 10th of January 1930 and, according to my mother, on a Monday morning.

I don’t know where I was the first two years of my life. Then I moved into a house at Peakhurst built by my father and grandfather. Four rooms. From there on till I was age five stayed there. Went to Peakhurst Public School about two and a half, three miles away until I was aged seven. From there I moved to Hurstville. Still went to Peakhurst Public School until time to go to high school,

which was Hurstville Technical High School. For two years and the third year was Kogarah High School because that included a pre-apprenticeship course, which was a wartime thing to produce tradesmen for the war effort. After that, well there’s quite a spread of [places], my parents were divorced and I went to live with my mother after living with my father. Moving around from job to job and place to place and finished up living at Five

Dock in Sydney with my mother and working at Nestles chocolate factory and from there that’s when I joined the air force at aged eighteen in 11th of October 1948 and I was the lowest of the low. You couldn’t get any lower because I was an airman recruit minor and that’s the lowest rank you could have in the air force and from there

I did recruit training at Richmond Base, New South Wales and then went to Wagga Wagga for training as instrument repairer. 108 course instrument repairers Wagga. After that completed I was sent to the aircraft depot at Amberley. There for I don’t know how many months. Not very long, about six months and then

sent to Williamtown Air Base to work on Mustang aircraft. That was the fighter aircraft of the day and then there’s twenty four different places I can run through on that but eventually the air force sent out requests for applicants to be for aircrew training. So I applied for that and got into the bottom of the list only because someone else I think had pulled out

at the last minute from civvie street [civilian life], and I was transferred to Point Cook for initial aircrew training, which was see about six months. From there to Ballarat, Victoria for the radio part of the course and then to East Sale, Victoria for the gunnery part of the course and after it was completed, back to Ballarat for the graduation ceremony and then to Richmond, back to Richmond

but as aircrew this time. Flying as a wireless operator on DC3 or Dakota aircraft, what the Yanks call C47. Then from there went to Japan, Iwakuni, and a course that was the start of my experience with the Korean War and flew in a Dakota aircraft there for nine months. Back to Australia. Back to Richmond

for a very short time. Then posted to Amberley to be a member of Lincoln crew and flew on many training operations with Lincolns and then posted to Malaya during the Malayan Emergency but I was only there about three months and I contacted some skin diseases and I spent a month in the British military hospital in Singapore and then they sent me home back to Richmond again, only this time in

Number 3 RAAF Hospital. I was only there for a couple a weeks and they discharged me from there and I was on strength then at Richmond base until I discharged in 1954. So that’s up to the air force part of it. Then after that for jobs, I think the first job I had was in a metal manufacturing company which also

had a dirt floor on the factory. Lot of dirt-floored places around there still, that’s 1954, and I didn’t particularly like that because everything was so primitive and so filthy. So then I got a job in the Sunbeam corporation assembling home lighting plans cause there’s in the bush there’s very little electricity on before rural power came into being and most properties had a home lighting plan of some kind and they were usually in

two or three voltages, a hundred and ten, thirty two or twelve and from there one job after the other making steel window frames, as a welder making steel frames. Then back to instruments at Smith and Sons at Bankstown Aerodrome. Worked on instruments, aircraft instruments again, and then well I got married and

my application for training at the University of Sydney I had to do three years of night school to qualify for entry. I’d already done that by 19… Oh I finished in 1957. In ’58, ’59 in 1960 I was a dental student, University of Sydney, but by that time also at the end of the

1960 I had two daughters. Two children, two daughters and the amount of money they gave us to live on as a student was a pittance compared to what people complain about today. So I just had to give it up and get a job cause I was paying off a house at the same time at Birrong, we were living at Birrong in Sydney, and then I got a job with the Commonwealth Department of Works in the roads and aerodrome section

laboratories testing concrete, soil and everything used in road manufacture or road building and aerodrome building. I was there about five and a half years then from there got a job at University of Queensland in the Department of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering and laboratory testing all sorts of things used in mining or from mining. Size reduction, grinding, smelting, all those sort a stuff

and then chance for a higher position, which I applied for and succeeded in obtaining was in the veterinary school. That time, was called ‘the department of veterinary medicine’ but staying in the same job for eighteen years it changed its name about four times and whilst at the University of Queensland in the beginning as few people realise it was a entity to itself, not answerable to most laws

of the land. It what they used to call a Quango [quasi-autonomous government organisation] I think, a Quango although it [was] self-funding in many ways but received state financial grants and then there was a… they could say what your wages were, what your leave was, what your sick leave [was] or wasn’t and there was no recourse to any court at that time. So quite a number of general, I was a member a general staff and quite a lot of us formed the General Staff Association

and we lobbied then for the senate to go back to the court and have the Act, the University of Queensland Act, changed and include access to the industrial court, which they did. From then on the unions could come in and take over and have membership and union meetings and so on. I became that union representative and then later on, when that Act was changed they also had one representative of

general staff on the senate of the University of Queensland and in 1980 I was elected to the senate. I was elected to the senate three times till retirement.

There’s a heap in the middle of all that.

Right from what I can remember?

Well I can do that.

We running? Right, well the house was at Peakhurst. Originally my grandfather had bought I think about five-acre block a land. He had a poultry farm on most of it and when one of my aunts was married he sliced off a little bit and wedding present and they built their house on it. That became my father married.

Sliced off another bit of the land and my father and grandfather built this four-roomed house. Fibro walls and corrugated iron roof. It was four rooms. Two bedrooms, a lounge room, another room was a kitchen, dining and bathroom and the kitchen consisted of fuel stove, solid fuel stove – wood, coal, coke – whatever and the kitchen table, which is homemade, and a couch and the chairs, two chairs

and two chairs. My brother and I sat on the other side of the table on a wooden bench type a thing, which when you lifted it up, was a bath underneath. So we had a bath once a week whether we needed it or not, every Friday night, and the water was heated in a fuel copper, a solid fuel heated copper in the laundry down the back yard, which was an earthen floor tin shed virtually and carried up by my parents

by kerosene tin bucketfuls and tipped into the bath and everybody had the same water. Seems odd today but there was no hot water system. There was electricity and we had one power point and that was for a tiny little electric grill, for want of a better name for it, and at first my mother used irons heated on the stove and then she graduated to an electric iron. This is in the

1930s and I think some people were actually getting a lot beyond that at that time but I didn’t consider that to be anything abnormal. Most of my aunts and uncles and other people I knew at that time lived in similar conditions. Yeah.

They built the house.

No I don’t remember doing I just I moved in must a been about three years old. That’s about it. I can remember, it seems odd but I can remember

sitting in a an old wicker pram looking out and seeing a intersection. That still sticks in my mind, which is about half a mile from where we lived and fairly primitive area because there was still a native Aboriginal camp only about half mile away from that. Not far from what was then a fairly main road to us cause there was odd motor car went down occasionally and that the road I lived in was a gravel

road. Was a… it was a main road but it was gravel and it went down to a full stop on a creek. For many years later it was bridged over but in that time it was a creek running through that and during the Depression years you didn’t get any money. We got food coupons and that was it and my parents used to go down to that creek and catch eels to supplement the rations and the whole area wasn’t over run with rabbits but there was a few rabbits around. So we were catching rabbits

and where my grandfather lived on the other part of the property there was a creek went through his, it was beautiful fresh water at that time, went through the creek and he used to grow vegetables down there and then hawk them around the neighbourhood, selling them to get some money cause you had to do something for money. In those days in the Depression the only way to get money was to earn it or steal it and there’s very few ways you could earn it

and I’ve got a good book on that if you want to go through that.

Well before the Depression he was, a he worked with buses. In those days in Sydney it was all private buses and they the people who started the bus runs, would buy a an engine chassis then they’d build the body themselves and start a bus run somewhere. Wouldn’t it wouldn’t matter to anybody really if there were three buses going to the same

place at the same time but three different companies and that was the sort of thing that was happening. It got to the stage at one time, my father was telling me, where they’d really drive down somewhere. “Anywhere for two shillings. Anywhere for two shillings.” This sort of thing. Anywhere. Well Sydney even then had far flung suburbs, well some were close in but if you said, “Palm Beach,” all right, a long way but two shillings, that was it.

Oh yeah. Yeah that was in 1939. I remember that but that’s when I was living at Hurstville then. We lived at this Peakhurst house till I was age seven. By that time the government had seen the stupidity of this public transport system. They started up the buses in Sydney, government bus runs, double-decker buses. Then my father was lucky enough to get a job as a motor mechanic on

that. So with money coming in, an assured job, government job. In those days they were assured, not like contracts today, they decided to save money and buy a new house at Hurstville. My mother got a job in a boot factory as leather machinist and my father worked as a motor mechanic. So they were able to pay off this house at Hurstville and 1939 came along. Well I can remember

there was a bit of a warning. We had this still this same little radio that my father had built from parts earlier.

Pardon?

Oh the radio? Well you can buy some kit things today from Dick Smith Electronics and you can build little things. Well this came as a kit. Was a I think the only place he could have bought it was he had a cousin that was a radio electrical shop at Kings Cross in Sydney. He got this kit,

put it all together and they used to call ’em ‘wireless’ those days but the thing’s full of wires all over the place and he made a little wooden cabinet to put it in and we still had that oh twenty, thirty years later but we sat in the lounge room this day, or night really, ready for a radio broadcast because people it had been broadcast earlier that there would be a broadcast about the

international situation. I don’t know what time it was, 6 o’clock or something, and I still remember Menzies, “My melancholy duty to inform you that as a consequence of Germany not re not ceasing hostile operations against Poland Great Britain has declared war on her and as a consequence Australia is now at war.” Well that may not be word for word

but near enough and some people looked at each other and didn’t know what to do, what to say and my father I think he liked the idea because it wasn’t too long before he joined the army. One of the first ones to join the army and…

Well I didn’t really know what war was. I knew that people got killed and I remember at school the headmaster assembled the whole

school into the main assembly area inside the school. Had a big radio on and as the news broadcasts were coming through, this is after the phoney war part of the 1940, the Germans were attacking France and we could hear the commentators describing what was happening and all that and we didn’t really understand what war was. I don’t think too many people do until you experience it and that didn’t

change an awful lot except my father wasn’t there any more. The money dried up. He didn’t have a job any more although my mother was still working and the car that he had, being a motor mechanic he had a car, that was sold for five pounds I remember that. Five pounds and my mother didn’t even know where my father was really. What camp he was in or where he was until he turned up one day early in 1940, January

1940 and…

Well I knew he’d gone away. Mum had said he’d gone and joined the army and he wasn’t there and the car was sold and Mum was starting to think about the drop in income and I remember yeah,

I know your prompting will bring back some things, that’s good. I remember going with my father back to a house in Peakhurst not far from where we lived because apparently a sister or some relation of General Blamey lived there and he had a talk to that person about well if you join the army. He didn’t want to go into as a private for six bob a day he wanted to, because he was a motor

mechanic, whether he could get a bit of rank and get a bit more money but apparently that was explained, yes that would probably happen but he’d have to go through as a private and then do all the rookie training and then after that be promoted to a sergeant, which he was. That’s what happened. So he come home on leave as a private though the first time early 1940 and

explained a bit about he couldn’t he didn’t say much about camp life or anything else. I suppose he told my mother a lot more than he told me, you know and then he went away again.

Not, no I can’t remember anything specific. Probably wanted to know how I was doing at school and that sort of thing but I can’t remember anything specific really at that time.

Well my brother was a bit of a rebel and he saw it as an opportunity I think and took advantage of it. He was older than me, but I took more note of my mother. She was the boss of the house and was the only boss of the house there then and we had jobs to do,

little jobs, which I followed with my children and get them started early and they get to understand responsibility and that things don’t happen for you. You have to make them happen. You have to get off get up and get out and do something. Won’t come to you in the letterbox as some people expect today I think and I can remember seeing him in his uniform and

walking back to catch a bus to go back to camp. That’s about all.

Oh khaki uniform. Woollen uniform. Trousers, the battle dress and buttoned up to the collar. His slouch hat. That’s about all I can remember there. The it I’m not sure at that time he had coloured patches on the sleeve or not. Probably not.

They were probably all doing recruit training and split off into battalions later.

Oh I didn’t see him again for a long time and he went away in May, I think it was, 1940. Went to England and while he was in England I’m not sure exactly what date

1940, a representative from the dominions to represent each of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and so on and the services, army, navy, air force, were invited to have tea with the Queen and…

Well

He’s in the photo and my parents, sorry my grandparents, grandfather and grandmother, very rarely went out anywhere. They were from the 1800s. Lived that style still and movies but they did go and see, I don’t know what it was, a movie a newsreel and on the newsreel [when cinemas played motion picture news] it had a bit about that tea party

and he recognised his son. So he contacted the well Movietone News or Fox News, I don’t know which one it was but he contacted asked could he have a print of it, which they did. That’s him after he was promoted to sergeant

about that time and that’s after he come back from the Middle East. That’s about 1942 that one but that garden party is I think the one that they supplied to my grandparents was coloured, hand coloured. It was a black and white photograph, black and white newsreel but it was hand coloured. So that’s that.

Beg your pardon?

No cause they lived at Peakhurst. I we lived at Hurstville. They didn’t have a car and grandfather never learned to drive. He was a horse man. Both my grandparents were. I can’t remember how I think it was the fact that, well we didn’t have telephones so they must have

written a letter and when they received this main photograph my grandfather had copies made for each of his children, he had six children, and sent each one a copy. So he sent one to my mother and well she was quite proud of that. Well they both were because well my grandparents and my both my parents were real

royalists. Everything to do with the Queen was fantastic so and to be that sort of thing

At that time anyway it would have been very rare for anyone to be invited to but another indication of what that the royal family was at that time. What they were like.

Not an awful lot cause I think really they they’d gone through a rough period I think before that. I remember afterwards, long after the Korean War, I remember reading once that married men only enlist if there’s problems at home and I just wondered about that, although some married men enlist to make sure they’ve their loved ones are safe. People enlist for all sorts of reasons.

Some because they think it’s fun, some because they think it’s a bit of an adventure or some because they think it’s the right thing to do and others, they don’t want to let the side down and all sorts of reasons but oh occasionally we’d get a letter. Dad used to write to each of us separately, although they put all the letters in the one envelope of course and that was always censored. Sometimes there was things cut out of them and scratched out of ’em and that

but after a while we got to know somewhere he must be somewhere where it’s hot and somewhere where it’s cold. You got to read what he’d done and where he’d been and things like that.

About the only thing I can remember, probably ridiculous, that he said that when they were in Tobruk they’d taken over some trenches and living

areas that the Italians had occupied before they took Tobruk and there was a few rats around in it. So he took the fire extinguisher out of the one of the trucks, because he was a motor mechanic, you know and got rid of the rats by squirting this fire extinguisher at them. That’s about the only thing I can remember. Yeah.

Oh in that time? Well the first thing I can remember,

there used to be Friday night shopping like there’s late night shopping introduced here later. Friday night shopping and you could go it was quite an outing because a lot of people were working like my mother. They couldn’t go shopping much during the day. Well a lot of people out of work too but those that had jobs couldn’t go shopping. So Saturday night was we used to go into Hurstville and

walk around the shops. Buy if you bought some groceries it was always put in a brown paper bag. There was no plastic bags then. One of my jobs was to carry these one of these plastic bags, sorry, brown paper bags and but the thing that when the war started we’d heard on radio that the Friday night shopping was finished. So they cancelled that.

I remember a couple across the road getting into their car to go shopping Friday night. I said, “Oh I’d better go and tell ’em Friday night shopping’s over,” and my mother said, “Ah, don’t worry about it. They probably won’t believe ya anyway.”

Sorry, what?

Well she wasn’t a happy-go-lucky sort, like she was just an average

sort of person as far as I can remember. A hard worker. She went through a very hard life herself. That’s another story and but she looked after us. There was no complaints. My father never drank at home that I know of. My mother

never drank. I the only thing she ever drank was tea. I know though my father would drink in later years a bit but never at home. So there was never anything like that and my mother could knit. We’d go to the pictures and she’d sit there looking at the screen knitting away. So I never went short of jumpers or socks or things like that. She could knit anything

without looking at it and she could cook. She could… well the way she… the hard life she had, she could make a meal out of the miniscule things, basics and this and when we were living at Peakhurst and again at Hurstville my father used to grow a lot of vegetables so she could make meals out of anything and then

the rationing started, meat rationing, tea rationing, sugar ‘rat’ [slang for ration] and butter. Clothes and I remember my mother had to go into Hurstville Town Hall one time to pick up the ration books and identity cards. We all had to have identity cards. No matter what age you were you had to have identity cards

and whatever you went, whatever you did, they could call on this identity card. There was no photograph on it as far as I know. They could say, “This is me and not my twin brother.” So but the main thing about the rationing too, well the authorities did take into account that children would be drinking tea with sugar at an early age. So there was no ration

for children under eight as I remember but when you were eight years old or older you could get a tea ration and a lot of things started to disappear from the shops. Hand tools, tobacco and cigarettes, which never worried me. My father used to smoke but my mother never did. And bread. Well the rat the

rationing hit they brought in a thing they call ‘manpower’, or we used to call manpower I don’t know what the real name for it was, where you couldn’t get a job yourself. You went to the authorities and they said they wanted to know what you could do. “Okay you’ll go over there and you’ll work for that company,” or, “You’ll go over there, work there,” and, “Righto, we’ll have you in the army,” or whatever and it was for women up to the age of forty five and men up to

about probably about the same age, thirty five, forty five. So at that time also deliveries there was meat from the butcher, groceries, milk and bread and ice. Ice chests. Very few refrigerators. That was all delivered and a bit like the private buses there earlier, you could see three bakers in the same street delivering to different houses

in the one street. Well of course you only needed one baker, so two of those went to other jobs or into the army or something. So deliveries all that different runs was finished forever and it became into separate runs. Each person had to deliver bread or milk or whatever it was. They had a particular run was worked out by the people who knew how, that was what they did, and that was it. You didn’t go out of it and

nobody else came into yours. So that changed things a bit and a lot of deliveries stopped. The groceries and the meat deliveries stopped cause most of the things were horsedrawn and the very few [that] were motor drawn but even the horsedrawn ones stopped. I don’t really understand the that one but I suppose the people who had to do the deliveries, well they were wanted in the army or something and…

Well I didn’t really worry too much about it except when I had to go and carry parcels home from the shop and where one time it used to be delivered, that sort of thing and one thing I can remember in the local shop, well they more of them around then than there are now, was the butter. Butter came in a wooden box, fifty six pounds to a box, and the shop keeper had to split it up into one pound and half pound

pats and wrap it up with paper and then sell it and I’ve got a few of those pats in the cupboard there if you want to have a look at them. Little butter pats made up and I remember one time I was about eleven or twelve. I was in the shop and the woman was makin’ these pound things and I started to wrap them up for her and she said, “Oh you’re pretty good at that. When you want a job come back here later on.” I never did though.

But clothing was a big shortage for growing children and I can remember that’s one time in school, I think it’s mentioned in one of these books I’ve got here, they set out if I was in an all boys high school the teachers would weigh you on the scales and if you were over a certain weight you’re entitled to extra clothing coupons or a height

you get extra clothing coupons and so I can remember at one stage going through. There was one chap, he was quite short for his age and a little bit under weight. About the only one in the whole class or group there that looked a bit out of it and I can remember the teacher, Mr Thrulkill, very nice

man, he said, “Stand on the scales again,” and the boy got up on the scales again and of course the old lever type, it wouldn’t go ‘clonk’. When it went ‘clonk’ you were over the weight. So he put his foot on the scales. ‘Cloonk’. Yeah.

Then he got his extra coupons but you want to see the reports on those years or

Or later?

Well high school years, I learnt woodwork and the first year I was there went into the woodwork class room. Pick up a plane and I picked it up left handedly and I got into trouble for that cause at primary school I picked up a pencil with my left hand, and in those days that was a no-no. You couldn’t do that so you used to cop a ruler, smack on the back of the hand to change over to the right hand.

So I became more of an ambidextrous because a that. Then I could paint away till one hand gets tired and then go on the other hand till that gets tired and go back on this one or hammer a nail in or screwdriver or whatever with either hand you know and though with this woodwork I remember they shoved us we were almost didn’t want you here, over the side benches cause that was for left hand kids over there. That was the first year

and then the second year we had to get onto usin’ our right hand for these not wooden planes doin’ wood work. So I still used to use left hand anyway but when the teacher was looking I’d use the right hand but that was in that one and the metalwork, oh we made book ends things like that and then the metalwork well it wouldn’t matter if I used the tin snips with my left hand. Nobody said anything or sometimes they’d

use a right hand curved ones cause sometimes you’re cutting curved things in tin and there’s a left hand turn and a right hand turn. So I used the right hand right hand, left hand that one and people would look at me and but the second year, well I went into high school only a couple a days after I’d turned twelve because my birthday being the 7th of January you finish one school year one age and start the next school year the next

age. So but that’s when the they start on sex education. They all hand out these little booklets with all these illustrations in them and it was years and years later that I finally understood what the heck they were all about. Bloody remarkable and the discussions that went on about them were remarkable. Very few really understood anything and then a few times there was fights in the playground

and of course that’d draw everybody like a dead horse would bring flies. I can remember having an argument with one chap once and he said, “Oh yeah?” and give me a push and I said, “Yeah,” and I pushed him back. “Yeah?” “Yeah.” Well in no time I looked around and there was a crowd around us. So we said, “Oh we’d better stop this. Getting out a hand,” cause everybody wanted a fight. To see blood on the ground, and that sort a thing. That was Hurstville High School but there was some rough types there cause in that year, was 1943,

the police went through all the school bags and all under the dash and everywhere. They just cordoned off the school one day and they discovered knives and guns and goodness knows what there. The kids had brought to school. There was some real roughies that time. Yeah. Actually I’ve got a scar there. A little thing there. That was from knife wound. Kids threw a knife at me and it hit

me there.

No it wasn’t at school but it was a school kid. I remember my brother had a few friends that had come round to see us one day and I always thought they were pretty rough types and yeah, they turned out to be pretty rough types all right. Anyway I’ve got the scar to prove it. Yeah but

Fun?

Well I had a pushbike, 1942 before they that the army took all the pushbikes that were made. I used to, the kid next door was only a couple of months younger than me at Hurstville so we used to ride pushbikes most of the time. Go here, there and everywhere. Pushbikes. Oh and then I started to keep WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s cause eggs were hard to get. So I built a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK yard and got some chickens and

raised them into WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and collected the eggs and then I got onto pigeons and canaries and vegetable growing. Sort of followed in my father’s steps footsteps a bit. My brother wasn’t interested in that. I even had ducks as well at one stage. Ducks, WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s, pigeons, canaries and goldfish. I built a goldfish pond cause the yard next door where my friend lived was a yard full a fish ponds. His father was his hobby and a paying hobby. He used to

breed and sell goldfish. So I built a fishpond. Had goldfish but the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s were pretty good because they supplied eggs and they virtually lived on just a kitchen refuse and grass and anything else I could scrounge round the place cause you couldn’t buy a lot of stuff but with the pigeons I used to feed them what they call pigeon peas but you couldn’t buy them after a while. The army took all the pigeon peas

to make pea soup and all the other things for the army and so I had to get rid of the pigeons. Well we ate them. Quite small but they’re good enough. They’re very nice eating and then the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s when they got a bit old you could eat them too. So that paid off. So that one the hobbies and I used to build model aeroplanes. Not the flying type but just a static type but that was the extent of my hobbies I think oh and another one was photography. That’s where that started.

My seventh birthday I was given a little what they call it a ‘Baby Brownie’, a little square thing made out of Bakelite [early plastic]. Took a 127 film. That started me on photographs. Well you’ll see some in that album and I’ve been a photographer ever since. Yeah.

Well at that by that time there’s a lot of things in the newspaper and I

actually started a scrap book. I don’t know what happened to it and oh the other thing that stands out too is in 19-, I’m not sure, ’43 I think. No it couldn’t a been. Must a been 1941. Yeah 1941 submarine shelled Sydney and we had the local council come round and put these air raid sirens

on telegraph poles round the place and they tried ’em out occasionally. They told us on the radio they were gonna try them out and the middle of the year, about end a May, early June 1941 sirens went off in the early morning and I woke up. The sirens were going. That’s all, just played the sirens. I couldn’t hear anybody in the house. So I got up and went to my mother’s room and I woke my mother up and I said, “Mum,

sirens are going off,” and she said, “Oh I think they’re probably only testing them. Go back to bed.” So I went back to bed and the radio news the next morning the submarines shelled Sydney and oh a bit a damage here and there and one man had his broke leg broken and a few other things and then later on, I didn’t hear the sirens go again but then there was the when the sub mini submarine attack. Only read about that

later. They were too far away from the harbour for that one but when they were shelling Sydney I heard that siren go off and later on with the submarines I remember they were they found the authorities found the batteries were, insulators in the batteries that we were making at that time had probably Bakelite or something between the plates. The Japanese had glass wall

separators. Quite a novelty. So they put a little cards, little bits of this stuff and stuck in a card, souvenir of a submarine attack on Sydney and selling them for the war effort and they raising money. Yeah, we bought one of those but I don’t know what happened to it.

Oh I think they were horrible. We didn’t know anything about what the and that later of course but thing about it we

knew that they were bombing London and over run France and Belgium, Holland and a course father was fighting them in the Middle East and although he had a strange feeling about the Germans and I think in the Middle East they weren’t as fanatical as they were probably in Europe and I’ve read a bit about since but

I know my father told me about it that the Italians, when they saw the Italians in the Middle East that there were two groups facing there was a majority of them that didn’t want to fight. They were glad to surrender and get out of the place but there were hard line Nazi Italians who when they were surrendering he said you had to watch them very carefully because they’d walk up and they might have a hand grenade. [Italian grenades] were Italian was quite small. I did have a couple he brought back from the

war and he said that, “Put up your hands,” and they’d put up their hands all right and they’d throw these hand grenades cause they’d already pulled the pin out of them. Or they’d pull a knife out of their boot and throw it. Of course they got shot for that but he said they’re only a minority but the majority were glad to surrender and get out of the place.

Well he said that oh they produced all sorts of booby traps but

once when they were captured, or particularly if they were wounded, they were quite surprised to see that they were being decently treated by the Australians and then they sort of developed a respect for the Australians. Not only but as soldiers, as fighters, as soldiers.

Oh when he came back. I was, no when they shifted from Tobruk into

Lebanon, Syria. Yeah. So I learnt a lot more after he came back. I didn’t know too much what was when he was over there, what was going on.

My mother probably knew a lot more but I was too young to understand much.

Oh, yeah. I can tell you a bit off the record on that.

Yeah but…

They were left alone. Yeah, left to their own devices. Not just left alone in the house but had to do things that women didn’t have to do before. I mean the rationing was one thing. You had to queue up. Queues were normal. You just didn’t walk into a shop and buy something. You had to queue because even though you had ration tickets that were available and you’re getting able to spend your ration tickets,

there was fifty other people there with the same idea and then as soon as it came in, you had to be there. If you didn’t, well they’d sell out and there was none left even though you had your rations. Not always but things happened like that and it was not unusual that if you’re in the shopping area at Hurstville somewhere sometime there was a queue starting to form you joined the queue and then you say, “What’s the queue for mate?”

and then you find out. You got in the queue first, otherwise you could miss out on something and that sort of carried over. You it’s nothing unusual to queue for things later on. Although people don’t like queues today and that was one thing about it. Transport another. Blackout. You had to put all these things up over the windows the blackout and the wardens’d come round and go

crook on you and another thing was the council’d send trucks of sand around and they’d dump half a tonne of sand every now and again down the street and we had to go out and collect the sand in buckets or boxes or something. Boxes were wooden boxes then, not cartons. Bring it in and get it ready for incendiary air raids. So we’d have something to throw on these incendiary bombs and if you go to the pictures on Saturdays, afternoon

or Saturday night, we used to go Saturday afternoon, they’d have all the documentary type things on showing the people what to do with incendiary bombs and that. Even at school you’d practice what the incendiary bombs had wooden big wooden scoops and a wooden raker thing. So you could throw some sand on it and then scrape it up on this wooden thing and throw more sand on it and looking after incendiary bombs and oh there were a few

first-aid courses going. Learned some first aid. How to bandage up someone’s leg and but [for] the women there was as shortage of everything. If you wanted to buy needles. Sewing needles like for hand work or sewing machine needles. All those things just sort of disappeared. Scissors. Things you took for granted.

No.

I was never really afraid in that sense. I used to be a bit worried at times that the Japs’d come down and but I was never really what I’d call afraid.

Oh I think they were sneaky little beggars cause actually the school I went to, primary school at Peakhurst, there was one of our students there was a Japanese and a course when war started he just

disappeared. His family went into internment and they lived not far from where I lived at Peakhurst. I didn’t know any more about him than that. I don’t know whether he was a good or bad but they were Japanese. That was the end of it.

No. No, although there was a rumour going around once that some optometrist in Hurstville had a lot of bombs stored under his shop. I don’t know what he’d want to store bombs under a

shop for, but people start rumours about anything in wartime.

Oh well that was the most important one I can remember. He was supposed to have bombs under his shop.

Not an awful lot. They’d probably follow the progress of the war. Like the Germans advancing here

or retreating there or bombings and things that were going on. Ships that were being sunk. Yeah that reminds me of a ship. When the [HMAS] Sydney sank the Bartolomeo [Colleoni] or whatever they call it, the Italian warship, we got a half day holiday from school for that. Yeah. Half day holiday when the Sydney sank this big Italian war ship but that’s all it meant to us. We got holidays.

The sinking of a ship didn’t mean much. Yeah and I remember too one of the school teachers saying once, gave us a form to fill out and, “Take it home, get your father to sign it,” and I said, “Well, it’ll take you about six months.” “What are you talking about?” I said, “My father’s overseas in the army.” “Well get your mother to sign it then.” Yeah, it was always men always came first in those days. Things always the first born if it was a son was the heir of the

family and the I know in those days it was difficult for a woman to own much. Everything was made out in the man’s name, husband’s name and all that sort of stuff. It’s changed thank goodness today. Yeah.

Quite a few, yeah. Actually some a the my school mates when I was at primary school cause I left there when I

was eleven, went to high school at twelve but there was some bigger kids there a bit older than me and you get to high school and you see ’em there for a couple of months or something and then they’re gone. You say, “What happened to Billy?” “He joined the army.” “But he’s only thirteen.” “Doesn’t matter, he joined the army.” Yeah. Few kids they were big enough and brazen enough and they did join the army and I know I worked with one later on and he

went right through. Middle East and New Guinea and he joined at thirteen.

When it finished, 1945, I was working FTS [Fitter and Turners Scheme] at Nolan Griffin and Company. That was it. When I left school at age fifteen you went to the manpower because the subjects I’d done at school, I’d already done a one year pre apprenticeship from at the third year high school.

Pre apprenticeship training in fitting and turning and I was sent to a switchboard manufacturing place at Camperdown, Sydney, and to travel there I’d have to walk to the train from Hurstville, where I lived. Hurstville Station. Get a train to Redfern, I think it was. Walk from there to Erskineville. Then you had to walk from the train.

I remember sitting in a train going to work this day and getting close to Erskineville where a lot a the railway work shops and things are in Sydney, or used to be. There was a group of about half a dozen men with long-handled shovels and the truck had just dumped a lot, load of ready mixed concrete, didn’t have ready mix trucks like they have now. Just ordinary tip truck. They’d dumped this load a concrete on the ground and they’re just about ready to start shovelling it somewhere.

I didn’t even give it any more thought. I just get on, get off the train, walk to work and the news’d come through. The war was over. “Go home.” So we turned round and went home and on the way back, hopped on the train going past this same spot again. Here’s this concrete and the shovels stuck in it. No men anywhere. So they would have had to blast the concrete to get the shovels out or something.

Yeah.

Oh that night my brother and I hopped on the train. Went into Sydney. Course everybody was going mad. Doing all sorts a things.

Well they were dancing in the street. Boys tryna kiss girls. Girls slapping boys and throwing confetti and, if they had any, and chucked

up newspaper and oh anything stupid really. Just making noises. Yahoo. Singing out, “‘Ray, it’s all over,” but then the that went on the next day too. Well I was back at work then. Yeah it was happy time but nobody really thought about, “Well what’s coming next?” and by that time you’d learnt to live without different things.

You didn’t worry about certain things any more. You knew you couldn’t get it, you couldn’t buy it, it wasn’t there. So you didn’t worry about it and then it was quite a long time before things really started to get back into the shops again but eventually there’s things get back in the shops and but petrol rationing was still on. That’s what stayed on for a long time. I’ve got my petrol-rationing certificate there and

yeah, there’s that was I know there was speeches on the radio from the Prime Minister and even John Curtin was, Chifley I think. John Curtin had died. Chifley and a course Churchill,

but most of the people said, “Well, we’ll have everybody home,” but my father was sent home ’42, discharged medically unfit. He’d been wounded in Tobruk. So he was already home by then. In fact…

Well coming home, well that’s another story if you want to put it all on record. Not very nice in some ways.

I can remember him coming home 1942. I was at school in high school and he came home. I think I was already home and he come in the front door. Well he was home and my brother was home. It was great to have Dad home again and but he was he wasn’t discharged for a long time after

that. He came home and had to go into hospital and that. I know he had his rifle and bayonet. I thought it was great fun. I was running around the yard playing with his bayonet at twelve year old and then my mother came home from work later on and I don’t know exactly when it was, whether it was that first day or a couple a days later, but what a

man when he… husband needs… when he comes home, is he wants his wife and my mother said, “No. I know what you’ve been doing all the years you’ve been away. You can go and sleep in the lounge room.” So he picked her up by the seat of her pants and the scruff of her neck and he threw her out the front door and he said, “If that’s what you think, you can stay out there.” Well that went down the road to a divorce

and then there was just my father, my brother and I at home then. Mmmm, and he went back to his job, mechanic on the buses. My brother by this time was working at Pitt Town Bottoms, out near Windsor, New South Wales, at a small crop place growing vegetables. Part of the war effort, growing

vegetables. That’s where they sent him. He wanted to work outside so they sent him out there.

Pardon?

My father? Never really knew. I knew he had a few scars somewhere on his head but never really knew. He was apparently he was standing unloading an ammunition truck or something when it blew up. He was blown somewhere. Survived and other people didn’t survive. Yeah.

Well, that’s the thing, that stories abound how when troops go to these places all it is BBB. You know Booze, Broads and Brawls and well that’s just rubbish, particularly when you’re in an active zone. Like in England, when he first went to England, well possibly he could a done, I don’t know, but he was more interested in looking up old family members cause we’re got a history from England

and my father, my grandfather was born in Sheffield and my father was born in Sydney and apparently he’s found a couple of relatives, great aunts or something. Visited them for afternoon tea on when he had leave he had and then they were sent from there to Tobruk. He wasn’t there an awful long time but then you’re on manoeuvres and other all sorts of things to do with the army once you’re there. You just don’t go on a holiday.

There’s no holiday and then of course in the Middle East all the time he was there you’re waging war. That’s it and then he came home and my mother said, “Oh no,” so she knew So-and-so’s husband was and he was kicking up his heels in Cairo on leave and somebody else was doing something. So she just said, “No, everybody did that,” and end of story.

Well we knew my mother was no saint in those years while he was away, but my brother wanted to leave home by that stage anyway. He was he wanted to go home work [live on, work on] on a property. I was still at school and I wanted to go the next morning after he came home I was getting ready to go to school. I said, “Goodbye, Dad, I’m going to school now,” and he said, “No, you’re not. You’re not going to school today.” I said, “I’ve got to go to school today. I’m having an important exam on today. I don’t want to miss

that.” So he said, “All right.” So I went to school, had the exam. Got good marks in it. Came home again and of course with no mum there, Dad had to take on the cooking and washing and everything else and that reminds me of something there that came on too because when I lived at Peakhurst we had a dirt-floor laundry and the bath was under the seat in the kitchen and when we moved into Hurstville there was a hot water

thing in the bathroom where you could light the gas and you have a hot bath. That was the only hot water. There was no other hot water in the house and the laundry there at Hurstville was attached to the house but you had to go out the back door, along a concrete path and into the laundry and the toilet was also out the back but also attached to the house. So but the I was used to the lawn as the toilet and

laundry at Peakhurst and the only difference was it was attached to the house and a little bit more modern but there was no hot water except in the bathroom. We had this gas hot water bath heater thing and the other thing that’s strange that’s come back, was that when my father was doing the washing at times, cause my mother was a great one for washing. Every Saturday morning, cause she worked durin’ the week, but every Saturday

morning she’d come through our clothes, my brother and myself, and everything she had even a hint of being dirty would go into the wash and my father’d had a look at things. “Right that’ll do for another week,” you know. “That’ll do for another week.” Quite different on that but also because these other things we could have a hot bath and there was more water, we could have a bath more often than once a week. Well it took a long time to get by that once-a-week business

but then I never wore underpants until I joined the air force. I didn’t know what they were. So it’s strange these things that you don’t have, you don’t miss them. You don’t know what they are, you don’t worry about ’em. So there’s only one little item like that cause I can remember my father looking at them, looking at the trousers and, “Oh they’ll do for another week,” you know. Strange to think back on it now.

Sorry, how?

Well when Mum was there, Dad was away, my mother always used to prepare the vegetables before she went to work. Put ’em in like potatoes and carrots and beans whatever. Put ’em in water in the saucepan and put ’em on the stove and my brother’s job was to light the stove, bring ’em up to the boil at 5 o’clock every afternoon.

Turn them down when they started to boil. My mother would come home just in time to just to serve ’em out or cook the meat or whatever it was and serve the thing and as time went on that became my job as I got old enough to do that and of course the other jobs, we’d have to keep the yard clean or do other things and of course with Mum gone and Dad taking over all that, well we didn’t do that any more. Dad did all that

and the other thing of course was the when we were at Peakhurst there was no refrigerator and no ice chest. So keeping things cold was hard. A so-called butter cooler in summer, which is a porcelain pot with a lid and you soaked that in water and put your butter in it and you hung it up on a breeze somewhere and that kept the butter cool and the meat went into a meat safe. It was always cooked as soon as you got it. Went into a meat safe,

which is about so square and cube made out of perforated zinc usually and you put your meat in that and you hoisted that up somewhere in the breeze but whatever you hoisted it up with, you put an oily rag on it so the ants wouldn’t climb up after the meat. Well when we got to Hurstville after, not too long after, they bought the house there I think it was probably 1938 or 1939 Dad bought a refrigerator.

That was something, to have a refrigerator, and different to today’s refrigerators. It was the ice section was just a little bit at the top and it had two little trays you could make ice in, ice cubes or put things in but you couldn’t actually put any food in there. It as long as if it went in those little trays it was all right but apart from that the rest of it was just refrigerator, not freezer. The only freezer was these little two trays

but I worked out a system from friends lived just up the street a bit. They had an ice chest and I used to make ice blocks in these two little trays and then go and sell them for threepence each to the people up the street for their ice chest. So I had an enterprise going there and it was the ice chest. That was good.

Well initially she went almost next door, because she had a brother and his family

living there. Their back fence came onto our side fence. She was there for a few weeks and or months. I can’t remember exactly when she shifted. Then she shifted out a there and she had a room in Marrickville somewhere. I know I visited her there a few times. I can’t remember the address and then in 1945, or before that actually but

cause the divorce was in 1943. I was thirteen and my mother had gone to dances or somewhere. She met a soldier who eventually became my stepfather and then they moved together into what was my grandmother’s house at Marrickville cause my grandmother was living there alone by this time and they moved in there with her.

He was a strange character. He had very little education. He also was a good self-taught mechanic but he didn’t like the city at all. Didn’t like Sydney. Used to drive around Sydney on a suicide mission. He had no idea of traffic and I mean that with a capital N. No idea of traffic. It was

actually terrifying to go with him in an old utility he had. He’d tear down the street. Oh he’d keep to the speed limit all right, thirty miles an hour, but when you came to an intersection he’d just drive straight through. Wouldn’t matter if it was a main road or what it was, just drive straight through. He had no idea that there could be other traffic around cause he was born and grew up around Charleville, western Queensland, and motor vehicles were pretty rare when he was growing up. More horsedrawn stuff than

motor vehicles and coming to Sydney with all this traffic, it oh that was it. Oh terrified at times. He never really did learn but he wanted to go bush. So I can go on a heck of a big story here if you want it. Yeah it was 1946.

They didn’t marry for quite a while. They lived together there, which was very unusual those days. Nothing unusual now but in those days he never ever referred to my mother as his wife at that time. He used to always say ‘the boys’ mother’ if he was talking about her to somebody. Always ‘the boys’ mother’ and he wanted to go back bush. So decided to

load up this utility he had with all our goods and chattels and just head off to the bush and for some reason or other, I think because my mother had relatives in Canberra, we headed towards Canberra. Went down as far as Goulburn. Stayed the night there. We had a tent. They’d bought a marquee tent and lived in a tent there for about a week while looking for work round there. We’ll see what’s going on. We finished

up went to the railway yard and the railway yard advertising for men. Went down there, I’m only sixteen my brother’s eighteen. Go in there and the chap said, “You’re gotta be nineteen to for this job.” I said, “Yeah, I’m nineteen.” Yeah, that’s all right. “I’m nineteen,” and so give us big forms to fill out. Filled all them out and said, “Well, you gotta start off as a fireman then if you want to be train driver… Well, but before you become firemen

you’ve gotta be an engine cleaner. You have to go to Erskineville to learn the engine cleaning and do your engine cleaning sort of work.” “That’s Sydney isn’t it?” “Yeah.” “We just came from there. We don’t want to go back there.” So we didn’t get the job. Didn’t take the job. So went back and loaded up and headed off towards Canberra and we got to a little place, I’ll think of the name of it in a minute. Anyway it was we stayed at camped at a

couple of places on the way. Got down there. Bungendore, that’s the name of the place. Bungendore and got in there. Oh went to a place on the way that were looking for men. It was a gravel place. So we went in and stayed the night at the quarters they had there. Next morning had an interview with the foreman and the job was loading gravel from these gravel

pits onto a truck with shovels. Nothing like that’s being done today. It’s all machine but that was a job. One pound a day. One pound a day. Five pounds a week. Loading this gravel with long handled shovels onto a truck. Then they’d take the gravel out and road making or something. No, didn’t like that idea very much. So we

packed up and went up got as far as Bungendore and one thing about my stepfather, he was very quick to approach people. Find out what’s going on round the place. “Where we can stay? Any jobs?” This sort of thing and we camped in what used to be an old shop, old – I don’t know what sort of shop. It had a huge oven, a two stove rather, huge stove in the kitchen with twin ovens about this big on each side of it and we camped

there. Had to pay rent to the owners and they had a sort of mixed business in the little town of Bungendore and we soon found out that the railway had an extra gang as they call it ‘resleepering, rerailing’ the line and they were camped at Bungendore. So, “Go up and talk to the boss up there.” So we did. Went up there. Talked to the boss but actually didn’t have the camp in Bungendore at that

stage. They were camped out of Bungendore but got on to him. “Yeah you can have a job. You’ve got to be over nineteen though.” “Yeah, I’m over nineteen.” “That’s all right,” and by this time I also was learning to drive. I learned to drive this old utility my stepfather had and well Bungendore was not all that far from Queanbeyan, which is not far from Canberra. So we went out and camped in the alongside

the railway line at first.

Down at Bungendore, yeah. Right. There was something I thought of before, now it’s lost it again about the early days with my mother. I can’t remember what it was now.

Well

I’ve already said a couple of things about the way she could you know put shelves up and make things out of boxes and cause that’s the life she had to leave led when she before she was married and

even during the Depression years when, as I say, if you wanted money you had to earn it, and you couldn’t get a job, or steal it and that was it.

Oh yeah.

Well it was a little cube to look at, round at the corners, made of Bakelite, you know the plastic first Baker, first plastic Bakelite.

It was only about the lens and the flip up little viewfinder and lever and a thing to wind the film on. That was it. You just flipped this thing up and say, “I’ll take that,” and that was it and then you wound the film on. Little hole in the back so you knew where how far to wind it on. That was it.

Anything. Anything and everything.

Course I only had pocket money to pay for it all but oh there’s some in the album there. It was just anything.

People, places, things. Animals. Birds. Anything at all, which I’ve done ever since probably.

Well I haven’t seen Sydney for quite a while so that’s a bit difficult but I was down there, was it Easter, two years ago? And it had changed dramatically since I know. A lot more buildings there.

Taller. A lot more rush rush rush rush here, there and everywhere to what used to be. Although it’s bad enough it got bad enough and dirtier. I’d say it was much dirtier than I remember. You know people throw things on the ground and general dirtier. Your trains, well I had my first ride on a double-decker train that time.

There were no double-deckers when I was living there and there seemed to be more built up where there were single houses now they’re flats or what do they call them now? Units. Blocks of things like that and the shops, I can remember some a the big shops. There used to be quite large shops, then the smaller shop. There seem to be more what you might call a cosmopolitan

type a shops than there used to be. Like Brisbane has now. Brisbane’s got like the Myers Centre. The old Myers building was Myers. Well now you go into Myers now there’s all little shops all over the place and some of them you wonder how they make a living there. That was a big difference that I noticed.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Right, well,

we had to camp out a town, about twenty miles out a town and live in tents working on the railway and you don’t realise how hard it is until you’re got a get into it. It’s pick and shovel work. Today it’s all done by machines but we used to do by hand with a pick and shovel. You’d have to first of all you got a stretch of line that had to be resleepered

or rerailed or both. If there’s resleepered, you’d have to jack up the line with mechanical jacks. Great big things and handles about this long and you’re levering them up and there’s had the ratchet was finger operated ratchet so as you pushed down you pushed one ratchet. When you pushed it up you lift the other ratchet. So you finally get it would jack up the railway line with all the sleepers attached to it and everything on these jacks. Then you come along

and knock the sleepers off with a great big sledge hammer. Whack the sleepers, ‘whack’ and a lot of ’em’d fall off anyway. They were that old and rotten it’s a wonder the trains didn’t run off the line and then you’d have to grab hold of these sleepers with a pair a big like ice tongs, drag them outside the track out a the way and when all that’s done you let the line

down again and you could dig up most of this ballast that was there. Depends on where you were whether you’d just loosen it up and get it ready for the next new sleepers or you’d dig it up and threw it out the side a the track. Now some a the sleepers that you very difficult to knock off with a sledge hammer they had what they call pig’s foot. It’s about a foot long and it was like two big fingers

and you knock that under the head of the dog spike holding the rail down with a sledge hammer and then you put your foot over the top of that where it was underneath the spike and you gave the other end sticking up in the air a great big whack with the sledge hammer. Well the idea of putting your foot over it, if that thing come flying out it didn’t hit ya, it hit ya foot instead, and you only did that wrong once

and then you’d throw all these dog spikes out to the side and finally got you’d leave about sometimes half a dozen a these on the stretch that you’re working on and drag in the new sleepers. Well while you’ve been doing all this work there’d be another four men out the side preparing the sleepers. They had a gauge that they’d mark

the sleepers. They’d saw, all hand work, saw a cut little about half an inch thick and another fellow come along with an adze and he’d scarf that little bit out. So that when the rails sit on the sleepers they were tilted slightly. Not just flat, they’d be tilted in. Well these’d be all be done while you’re doing the other bit. So then you grab hold of the new sleepers, always two men. One on each side of these great big tongs. You drag ’em

up, position them underneath the line once you’ve got all the rest of it prepared and then the line of course the rails’d be up in the air again and then when the rails come down sit on those. You’d have to be knocking them into position with sledge hammers instead of just apart, right in position and everything else and then all the position or the

batch that you’re doing then you’d drop the tongs. Then you’d pick up the bib and brace. You know the old brace and bit that used to wind like this? Bore holes? Well it was about that long. It was about oh a metre and a half long this thing. So you actually stood up, you poked the bit on the position you want to bore the hole next to the rail and you were standing up. You wind this thing

through and there’d have to be two of those on each end, so four holes per sleeper and you there’d be a number of fellows doing all this, going along boring these holes and by this time there’s somebody else throwing the dog spikes out, the new ones, on each point and when all the holes are bored and then the spikes are ready, you put down that borer and you pick up a spike hammer and it was a the head’d be about that long and

each end only about that round and it was tapered so that when you hit the spike to knock it in, it was narrow enough to go down the side of the rail. So you only hit the spike and knock it in like a big knocking a big nail in virtually. Unfortunately until you learn how to do that you would hit the rail and it would jar right through everything. So you learned how to hit the spike without

hitting the rail but the other things about it, sometimes the rail would be up here and the sleeper’d be down here. So the way to get the sleeper up so you could whack into, the whack the dog spike into it, I’ve got some photographs there you’ll see later, that one usually in pairs and one a the pair would be sitting on the bar, it was a great big crow bar with a like a hand up one end of it and you use this

pig’s foot I explained before, you put that down on the ground as a fulcrum. You put this big bar under the end of the sleeper and if you sat on the bar you’d bring the sleeper up like a big lever. So then your weight would on the bar would hold that sleeper in position while your mate actually whacked the dog spikes into position and then when that’s all done, when there’s enough of them done you would pull out these temporary ties there that you left

earlier and replace them with your sleepers. Now sometimes when you’re half way through all this a train would come along but there was this signalman at each end. Where we worked at Bungendore it was on a single track. So there’s a signalman at each end so they knew what the timetables were and they had to put out their detonator signals. The detonator signals are something like a big chocolate biscuit in

shape and size but they’re a red colour with lead straps. So you put these over the rail and as the train came along and run over ’em it’d go ‘bang’ with a loud bang. Loud enough for everybody to hear it and you put them out in numbers. If it was three out that meant the train had to stop or slow down. Two, two to stop. I think it was or three to stop, three to slow down but there was also a signalman

there with a flag, two flags. He had a red one to stop and a lighter coloured orangey coloured one to slow down and usually we knew what time the train was coming through. So you’d have to get enough work done in the time to lower that rail down back again onto the ground, even though only half the sleepers might be tied in with these dog spikes, so then the train could then just creep over it very slowly and then be on its way

but on one occasion I remember winter time, Bungendore, it’s a very cold area. Like Canberra, cold in winter, the train was coming around the corner and had a bit of a down slope to where we were working on a flat and some of the drivers’d get a bit blasé about it. They hear the ‘bang bang bang’ from the detonators and they start slowing down and they think “Oh well you’ve only got a slow down so much then you can creep over the

line.” On this occasion there was ice on the rails and we weren’t quite up to a position where he could go on and he got a red flag but because of the ice on the rails he couldn’t stop. So you can imagine what’s happening. We’re all standing away from the rails a bit watching this train coming what lookin’ at the rails, look at the train, look at the rails. The wheels are goin’ backwards.

He had it in reverse trying to stop, the old steam train trying stop and actually it was up in the air. I know my brother was on one of the jacks and it was up in the air and here’s this train coming trying to stop on the ice on the rails and they’re going like mad trying get this thing down with two fingers on these ratchets, the big lever.

I remember my brother was on this one and the handle actually went into a socket on the jack and I remember right till the last minute pull the handle out threw it, pulled the jack out, threw himself backwards. The train went. One a the

one a those things that happen. It happened mainly two reasons. I think of course the driver was a bit blasé about the signals. He thought he’d get an amber and go straight through but he actually got a red and the ice on the rails. Yeah. Anyway after that effort my stepfather said, “Oh it’s too darn cold here. Let’s move up out west somewhere where it’s warmer.” So we packed

everything up, or we decided to pack everything up but then my brother had had enough and he had an old car, an old Willies sedan not sedan, old Willies Tourer. Packed all his goods in that and he went back to Sydney. So there was only my mother and stepfather and myself there then and the poor old utility, all the stuff we’d have to carry in it. We thought we’d be better if we had another vehicle. I was sixteen,

remember. So we went into Queanbeyan one time and there was an old T model Ford sitting there, needed some work done on it. So my stepfather was talking to the mechanic and decided to buy this old T model Ford. So I bought it. We had to tow it home. It wasn’t in running order. Had to tow it home from Queanbeyan to Bungendore

and my stepfather’s quite innovative and he rigged up a tow rope source to tow this thing home. It was all right and there were no brakes on this old Ford. It was all right along the flat but we got to one point where we’re going down hill and I’m driving this T Ford had no brakes on it and I’m just overtaking him and he’s going slow. So I finished up

we’d managed to get to the bottom of this grade, it was a gravel road at that time, and decided, “Well that’s no good.” So he went into the bush, cut down a sapling, brought that back out and there was a ordinary farm wire fence alongside the road at one point. So he cut some of the wire off that and used the wire and the sapling to make a tow bar between the two vehicles. So when he hit the brakes I slowed down automatically.

That’s how we got it home then. Yeah. So the next thing was okay, I did that. I didn’t have my licence or anything then. So I thought, “Well, when we get to work on it, get it registered,” which we did, and got it registered in Bungendore and its registration number was double-T 950. Strange isn’t it? T model Ford with a registration TT.

Anyway, I still had to have a licence to drive it so I could drive my stepfather’s old utility. So we went into Queanbeyan. Went into the police station to make applications for driver’s licence. There was no intermediate period then. You just went in and did the test straight away. So taking all the particulars down” name, address, occupation, so and so and so. “Age?”

“Nineteen.” “All right. Righto. That’s it.” Take me out for a trip around Queanbeyan in this old utility. I came back. “Okay,” he wrote out this temporary licence. “Right, here you are. This is it.” So that was that. I had my licence. Then we packed everything up after that and headed west and another saga in that story was got to a little place called Weethalle in mid west a New South Wales.

Camped for the night there. My stepfather could always find somewhere to camp. Like in a building or a shearers’ quarters or a shed or something. Camped the night there and we started off next day and packed everything up ready to go and I thought, “Before we go I’d better check all the lights and everything.” Now what I didn’t realise that a T model Ford has a sort of a generator on the fly wheel. I knew that but I didn’t realise it was

twelve volts. It worked the coils okay, for the ignition. A T model Ford has one coil for each cylinder, four coils. It worked them all right. So when I turned the lights on, six volt lamps, they just blew with the twelve volts but I didn’t know that. Turned ’em on, they worked. “Yeah.” Turned ’em out but I didn’t realise they’d blown in that time. So we looked at the map where we were going, all gravel roads

and going to little towns on the way and at one place marked on the map The Gap Dam. Well I took that to be a little village or something. Actually it was only a dam, a hole in the water with, hole in the ground with water in it called The Gap Dam and that was it. Landmark. So I’m driving along and I couldn’t find this Gap Dam. “Oh.” Finished up getting dark.

So come to a place called Rankins Springs. I tried to turn my lights on, course I got no lights. I’m driving by the light of the tail lamp. It was still on. I’m looking out backwards driving along so I didn’t run off the road. Got to Rankins Springs and there was a store still open and I only just had enough money to buy one lamp for a head lamp. So I bought one lamp, put it in

and I told this store owner I wanted to turn off and he said, “Oh that,” he explained “it’s not a village there, it’s just this little dam.” So I headed back towards that place and I must have passed it again in the night and roaring along at about thirty mile an hour down a bit of a grade. Next thing there’s a cow fair in front of me on the road. So I

swang to the left and swing to the right and next thing the wheels are made, the wooden wheels and one wheel collapsed on the right hand side of the car and the whole thing just went straight over on its top and smashed the top down and luckily I was thrown out and the battery was in there. I thought, “The battery’s in there. Got a get it out otherwise it’s gonna stall,” so I got in under there with a torch and a few spanners and I got

the battery out and the acid dripping on me and a few other things. When daylight came, a car came along later on and I got a lift into Weethalle. Went into the police station to report this accident and he said, “Oh yeah.” He took my name and address and everything else. Told him what was happening, we were going from one place to another. “I’m going to Ivanhoe and my mother and stepfather’d be at Ivanhoe,” and I missed them. They were gonna follow me but I’ve obviously missed

them because I overshot the Gap Dam and he would a turned there and the police man said, “Righto, what’s where your licence?” and I’m going through my papers out of my wallet. Looked, I can’t find the darn thing and he says “Have you got a bloody licence?” and I said, “Yeah. I’ve got a licence.” “What are these?” “It’s the receipt.” “Oh, it’s only a new one,” and his whole demeanour changed. “Oh this must be it. This is a

police receipt.” So I gave it to him. It was a receipt for the licence from Queanbeyan and he said, “Where’s the car?” and I said, “It’s down the road there a few miles.” So then he arranged then for a couple a chaps with a truck to go out and they’re lucky that, well, the way the road was, they could back the truck up and sort of manoeuvre the wreck onto it, bring it back to Weethalle and unload it where same place I’d camped before

then he said, “We’d better send a message to your parents.” So he took me to the post office and he sent a telegram to the station master at Ivanhoe putting in graphic words, well he put it all in graphic words what happened and I was still here. Came out a there and he made sure I was that the old wreck was there, that I had food, a place to sleep, everything else

and he gave me ten shillings and later on that night my mother and stepfather arrived back and then we set about next day repairing this old thing. So managed I needed a new wheel, this one had collapsed. So we went to the, my stepfather, he had a lovely experience with rubbish tips, cause you did in the Depression days. Go to the rubbish tip, you find anything there.

So I went to the rubbish tip. Fair enough there’s a beautiful wheel there. So he brought the wheel back and got it all going. Loaded up again another couple a days later and headed off to Ivanhoe cause no windscreen and I’ve got goggles on and yeah, got there all right. Stayed out there for a few months workin’ on a railway line out there and that’s where my mother got her driver’s licence up out there cause

the mileage is when you worked on a railway like that your address was a mileage. Either 519 or 529 and we were actually out at 529 on the Broken Hill line and my mother had actually been into town a few times to get supplies, then back out again without a licence and this time she thought, “I’d better go and get a licence.” So she drove in this day and it had been raining and the roads were slippery as anything with that soil,

all gravel roads, dirt roads. Finished up got into town all right. Went to the police station and, “I’ve come to get a driver’s licence.” So well she’s he said, “Where’s your car?” She said, “Outside there.” Looked out. There’s mud splattered all over this old utility and he said to my mother

“Where did you come from today?” and she said, “Oh 529 mile out on the Broken Hill line,” and he had a fair idea where that was. So he said, “Did you just drive in in that now?” and my mother thought, “Well I’d better tell him otherwise he’ll find out and he I might not get me licence. If he knows I’m driving without a licence or something he might charge me.” Anyway she said, “Yes I drove in today,” and, “Right.” He said, “If you can drive in that on

those roads in this weather, here’s your licence.” Yeah. Gave her her licence straight away. So she told us all about it when she got home. She was a better driver than my stepfather in traffic later on. He’s still suicide man.

Oh. You want to jump up there when I was in the police force before that.

Oh well. Well I got a bit sick and tired of this very hard work, pick and shovel work on the railway and the extremes of temperature working out there. That was that bit ironical actually when I say that but later for Korea but I thought, “I’m not getting anywhere here. This is I’m only a labourer, working on a pick and shovel.”

So I’m not sure how it came about but I thought, well the police force was advertising for cadets. So I was too young to join the police force, my correct age, but I was at the right age for the cadets. So I wrote away and they said, “Come on in,” and by this time I had a motorbike licence and a motorbike and I rode the motorbike back to Sydney and I think by this time we’d also moved back from

the 529 mile back into Parkes, the town of Parkes, living there when this happened or outside of it. Outside the railway again, little siding called Botfield and working there and I rode from Botfield through Parkes and into Sydney. Had an interview. Accepted. So I rode back out again to give my notice and everything else to the railway. So I rode back again to Sydney, I was living with my father again then,

and I became a police cadet, number 692. That’s all on that list I’ve got there. Yeah and I was stationed in Hurstville Police Station and the cadet’s job was basically to learn typing, which I could do. Learn shorthand, which I couldn’t do, and learn law, which I found easy to learn, and learn the police procedures by we used to

every morning we’d go into Redfern at police headquarters. I think it’s shifted from there now, Redfern police headquarters and we had lectures on law and police procedures and all that sort and drill. Funny about drill, not everyone likes drill and got back out to the station after lunch or for lunch and one of the jobs they loved giving to cadets is bringing everything up to date. If you’ve got a

book of regulations and then they change it, you’ve got to go through all the copies of the books they’ve got and scratch out what they’d changed and paste in a little strip of paper with the new thing on top of it and that was my main duty and then sometimes when people would come in to renew their pistol licences there’d be a senior sergeant taking all the details down. I’d have to read off the number serial number, manufacturer’s name and everything else about each pistol and renew all the pistol licences.

That’s all changed now and sometimes the police would bring in a stray dog and they’d take it round the back of the police station and shoot it. That was one of the jobs they had to do. Like a I don’t know they do too much in Queensland now but it came under a thing called a the Dog and Goat Act. You know stray dogs and stray goats. The police had to catch ’em and shoot ’em and then the garbage chap used

to call in every time and looking for dogs. They’d say, “Nah, none today,” or, “Three out there,” or somethin’ like you know. All these stray dogs that had been shot and I thought, “I’m not gonna wear this job,” and by the time you realise there’s promotions that’s was then so slow, so you could be there for twenty five years before you make sergeant or something. Then one of my uncles was already in the police force and he was sergeant

and, probably one of the reasons I joined, and I got to know some very nice people in the police force but like everywhere else there’s one or two that are the other way and made some friends. So I thought, “Oh I’m not getting anywhere.” So decided to get out of that job and about this time my father

had started up a little manufacturing business. So I got out of the police force. I cause I couldn’t do the shorthand. That was the biggest problem. I liked the rest of it really but the shorthand, it spoilt my spelling and everything else cause you have a word like ‘thorough.’ Well that’s got a few ticks and a dot or something and you forget the how to spell it when you’re coming back. I did anyway

but so they said, “Look okay, resign from he cadets now. Soon as you turn nineteen come back in. You won’t have to learn shorthand.” Typing’s all right but not shorthand. So, “Righto. I’ll do that.” So in the meantime, as I say, my father had opened up this little business in town, in the city somewhere. Camper-, no, not Camperdown. Anyway my brothers were already working there so I started to work

for them, my father and he had a partner manufacturing some of the things you just couldn’t buy, like a copper. Washing machines were very rare so most people had a copper of some sort. So you’re making them out of aluminium and electric cord in them and drying machines, there was a spin dryer. He had a spin dryer was water powered. He was making those and the other thing he was making was boxes, ring boxes for engagement rings and wedding rings.

Little boxes that the people throw ’em away these days but you couldn’t buy them in those days. So he started to make those for all the jewellers. So…

Ah, practically anything. Anything and everything. Actually it was quite funny because they were both starting out. They were both ex-army and they just wanted to go into their own business and because you couldn’t buy these things, if there was one there for sale no matter what it looked like, as long as it worked people would buy it.

So these coppers we called them or boilers, probably a better name, a boiler, made of aluminium and around that there was a steel shroud from the top to the bottom and everything else and a lid and a stand. It had three aluminium legs on it so you had to bore the holes in the aluminium legs and the bottom of this shroud and bolt them on. So all those like assembly jobs and bore a hole

in the middle of the lid for another knob to go on but then the shroud, you had to paint it. It was painted by hand with a brush. I mean do that today they’d laugh at you but we couldn’t make enough of these things cause there’s no one else couldn’t make enough of ’em. They were even sent by air, by air mind you, to Melbourne. Make up very loose looking crates out of wood, pack these things in to send by air to Melbourne.

cause the biggest you could almost do anything and make money out of it in those days after the end of the Second World War.

Ah that’d be 1947, ’48. Yeah.

Oh about a year and I couldn’t see much future in that.

Yeah, I’ve always been a bit ambitious I suppose, trying get on, and,

as I say, the yeah I thought, “Well what am I gonna do in the next ten years, twenty years’ time?” This sort of it was only sort of process work. “Gotta learn something.” I’d already done this year’s apprenticeship, pre-apprenticeship course. So I had some formal training in fitting and turning

but I’d also worked in along there in the middle of all that as a what they call electrical mechanic. That’s wiring houses and factories with wires and power points and lights and things like that. Had about a year’s, six months or something experience there. So put those two together but and I thought, “Oh and I know the army and the air force, the navy, the three of them are advertising.” You know they’d demobbed

all their permanent staff. They’re trying keep the things going. So they had training schools going. I thought, “Oh well there’s training schools.” I know one chap was working there as well for a while. He tried to talk me into joining the navy and my father was trying talk me into joining the army cause he’d been in the army and one of my other uncles he had been in the air force and I think, “Well if you’re in the navy and they sink your ship it’s a long way to swim home and if you’re in the army you’ve gotta

sleep out on the ground and all this sort a thing,” and I thought, “The air force sounds better. You can sleep in barracks or a tent or something.” So I thought, “Oh well the air force’d be better.” So I joined the air force on October 11th 1948 and in the interview when they interview everything and of course I’d already done a pre-apprenticeship training. I had experience in the electrical part, in house wiring and the work I’d done

as a sheet-metal worker they called it or actually a process sheet-metal work. So they put me down to do an instrument course after I finished my recruit training. So I went from there to Richmond. Arrived out at Richmond one late afternoon with about another twenty other fellow recruits and hopped out of the truck and look around at this huge air force base and, “Oh dear,

what have I got myself into here?”

Well, I just didn’t understand didn’t know anything about it. Didn’t know where I was gonna eat or where I was gonna sleep or anything else and you’ve just got your civilian clothes on and I took a change of clothes in a bag and all this sort a stuff. So they, we knew how to march a bit from high school days so ya fall in and march. Marched us down to the mess, the air

men’s mess, and you walk in there and you get a plate and all the rest of it and walk down the table and pick up your spoon, knife and fork and walk down the table. Sit down and in amongst all the other people. They look at ya down their nose, “Oh you’re a new recruit. Oh,” and I looked at the plate and looked, I’ve forgotten what the meat was but I remember one of the vegetables was sweet turnip and I can’t stand sweet turnip but I thought, “I suppose

you gotta eat the darn stuff while you’re in here now.” So I ate it. I learnt later on you didn’t have to eat it but…

The base?

Well of course it’s all changed again now but that was 1948. The base, it was about a mile up from the railway station to the entrance. The railway station’s called Clarendon. We went actually up by train to Clarendon, hopped in the air force truck and they drove us in up to the main

gate, through the main gate. Now on the right was a little road before you went in the main gate on the left. On the right was a cinema, picture show and there were other wartime barracks out there, wartime huts and things and a few lecture rooms, that sort a stuff. Then you went through the main gate was all brick, it was all permanent. All nice looking guard house and everything there and you went down this nice concrete road and then you started to come onto these

double storey blocks, brick blocks, and that’s where we were gonna be quartered for the recruit training, in these nice brick blocks. Oh it was looked lovely and in the middle a big parade ground cause the blocks’ round like a U-shape around that and on the other end was the air men’s mess facing it and there was somewhere there was a flag pole and then beyond that sick quarters. If you kept on going you finished up on the aerodrome part itself and the workshops and hangars and things down there

and…

About the rowing boat?

Well I’m not sure what started me off that but I think at that time I used to be able to get the magazine called Popular Mechanics and there was all these ideas in it and things about new developments, new inventions and always somewhere at the back there was how to make something and I used to make lots of these little things and a big one was a boat, so I decided I’d make this

rowing boat but I didn’t have enough timber to make a proper rowing boat. So I built the frame out of timber and I covered it with galvanised iron and soldered all the joints together and made two oars out of timber and got two rowlocks made to put the oars in and by this time my brother had acquired a horse and a cart, horse and cart. So we loaded up this rowing

boat, it was only about eight feet long, took it out to where my grandparents lived at Peakhurst cause where this creek went through their property as I mentioned earlier, it ran into a salt pan. Salt, it’s called Salt Pan Creek and there’s a swimming hole there. So we take it out to this swimming hole and try it out, see if it floated or fell over or whatever. So we got it out there on this horse and cart and couldn’t take the cart all the way

in, so we carted it the rest of the way and took the oars in and put ’em in and launched the boat and I’m sitting here rowing around, going around and around in circles in this thing and having a great time. Yeah, it doesn’t sink. It looks doesn’t tip over. It goes good and so I was, “Where are we gonna leave it? Can’t take it back home or bring it back cause,” so I took it to my grandparents’ place and, “Oh yes,” granddad said, “Yeah, right. Leave it there in front of that shed there. It’ll be right.” Yeah. So

put it up on some wooden blocks, which he brought out. Turned it upside down and put it on there and put the oars underneath it and good place to store it. Never saw it again.

No idea.

I’d be oh probably about fourteen, something like that. Yeah.

Actually I forgot about it you know over the years but at this time, or before that my grandfather’d long retired and when the war started there was an American army hospital built about three mile away at Herne Bay. They call it Herne Bay, it’s called Riverwood now. Herne Bay got a naughty name about it so they changed it to Riverwood and this American hospital and he got a job there,

I think the Yanks call it a janitor. He was his job was to just walk around and stoke the fires up in the huts in the winter time and give out magazines and papers to the patients and generally this sort of stuff but towards the end of the war he’d go for or started to walk to this place and then he wouldn’t get there. So they’d have to go out looking for him. He’d lost his mind was going. He couldn’t even say who he was or where he was and things like that and I remember

my grandmother used to put a envelope in his say name and address on it, coat pocket or shirt pocket or something, so when somebody found him they could go through his pockets and find out where he lived, then bring him back home again and eventually he just had to give it up. He was wandering off too much and didn’t know where he was and, and then course when I joined the air force at eighteen I hardly went back there cause I was always away and

when he died I was in Korea when he died and the place was sold up and my grandmother went to live with her eldest daughter and I never went back to the house again.

No, not very much at all. Particularly not the theory of flight, no idea. I’d made model aeroplanes but I’d never made flying ones so I didn’t really know about

the theory of flight, which I had to learn later and I didn’t know lots of things. Even today people don’t realise that the air force in those days the summer dress was khaki. I think it’s blue today, light blue, but we had slouch hats the same as the army and our summer dress could be taken for army dress quite easily.

Well after we had that

first meal taken then marched up to one of these brick blocks and allotted one to a room, which I thought was fantastic, one to a room, and it was a palliasse. Palliasse is a like a big chaff bag filled with hay. That was our bed, our mattress and passed the night and I don’t know how because we didn’t get any blankets till the next day. That was

October, so the weather was all right. So next day we marched out, marched into one of these lecture rooms across the road into where these wartime huts were built, away from the permanent all brick things, and it was like a classroom and I thought, “Good lord. I left school to get away and I’m back in a classroom again,” and here we sat down in the classroom and the this corporal coming around and handing out bits of paper and an envelope and I thought, “What’s all this?” Looked at it. It’s a will form and a will form

envelope. That’s the first thing you do. You make out your will and put it in that envelope. Yeah, first duty you got and I learned later that the army, navy’s not much difference.

Well I thought, “What have I got to leave anybody?” Yeah.

No. I wasn’t worried about it at all. Not a bit.

I just worried about, “What have I got to leave anybody? Not much.” I didn’t have much at all. So I put everything left it to my mother and then put it in the envelope and that was it and then after that they marched us out, oh gave us a one of these big overgrown chaff bag things, marched out to a great pile a hay out somewhere. They said, “Right, fill it up.” “What’s this for?” “You’re got to make your own palliasse.” The ones we slept on, they’d been taken out and destroyed.

I suppose for fleas or whatever. Bed bugs, you name it. So had to get back, fill out this darn thing and depends on how generous you were or how damp your hay was you filled it up but then we learned later on, the next morning actually, you had to fold up your blankets every morning and fold this palliasse into three every morning and put your folded up blankets on top of it

and then you had to clean everything. Nobody cleaned it for you. Like that old song, you did everything. You cleaned the floor, you cleaned your boots, you cleaned the latrines, you cleaned the showers, you cleaned the toilets, you cleaned everything ready for inspection.

Right and then Monday night was called ‘panic night’. That’s when you had to clean everything. Polish everything. Put away things out a sight that are not to be seen and

that was pretty hard because you had your locker, bedside locker. Everything in that room had to be spot on. Everything in the right place. Clean, nothing dirty. Even had to polish the instep of your shoes. Not just the top, but instep of the shoes had to be polished as well and then you vetted on parade as you started to learn drill and drill and drill and more drill and the panic night, while you were out on the Tuesday

the commanding officer would come around and inspect your room and feel for dust everywhere. Cobwebs or dirt or whatever or things that shouldn’t be there, like a beer bottle top or whatever. Well that part never worried me, I never drank, and then you get issued with rifles. Real old recruit training rifles they are. They work, they shoot and everything else but they’ve been through so many recruits they’re pretty battered about and then you learn rifle drill and then

after a while you go down to the rifle range and learn to shoot it.

I didn’t mind that at all actually that part but the part I didn’t like was, well I started to take things seriously. You do your job properly, you’d learn all this properly. Some of the young fellas same age, eighteen, it was all a game to them. Playing around, fooling around and because the squad was a bit unruly we’d get extra duties or something and they couldn’t understand that. “Hey, you gotta behave yourself unless you

gotta do all this extra things.” Then you’d get guard duty. After you learn how to shoot and bit a rifle drill and everything else you cop guard duty. You’re on guard for twenty four hours and that duty’s always rotated.

A .22 single shot rifle, yeah. Yeah I bought that when I was sixteen. Quite legal then, sixteen to own a rifle.

Oh yeah. I used to

shoot rabbits. Actually when we lived at Botfield when I was we were workin’ on the railway there, that’s out of Parkes, my mother’d say one, say one weekend afternoon, say, “Now I think we’ll have some rabbit for tea tonight. Can you go and get a nice rabbit?” So rabbits all over the place. So I’d go out and shoot a rabbit, bring it back. She’d say, “No, that’s a bit big. That might be a bit tough.” So I’d give that to the dog and go away and shoot another one. “Yeah, that’s a bit better. This should be all right.” So I’d skin it and clean it

and Mum’d cook it and plenty of rabbits. So I got, I shot lots a rabbits for that. My main targets actually and I learnt later on, we’ll come back to that later, that I could take the rifle with me in the air force. You had to get a certificate for it and everything else, special permission but you could take it.

Yeah, one particular friend.

Tommy Buckley. Bit shorter than me, little fella but he had a sister. That was interesting. Yeah. So I got to know his sister and we were going in the air force October, 11th of October. Supposed to be twelve weeks recruit training. Well Christmas came into that. So that made the overall length a bit longer. So got to

know where he lived and visit his sister and then go to the pictures with her and then come back to Sydney and back and forth the weekends on the train and that was sort of started to fall into a bit of a routine and then suddenly it’s all over. You’ve finished your recruit training, which incidentally included a lot of things that the army does, like bayonet practice, in and out of trenches, barb wire, all that stuff and you’re off to wherever the next thing is. I’m off

to Wagga Wagga to the big base there, Forest Hill, where I started to do my instrument training.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Then of course she must a cried for about five minutes and then found another bloke.

Ah well I didn’t find anyone for a long time after that, real long time. Oh we used to go to dances and pictures and that sort a thing but, no never really got

involved with anyone for a long time. Years.

Me?

Oh she?

Ooh yeah. She was a doll. Yeah ten out a ten type you know. Mmm but…

Oh. The training period at Wagga, we used

to, well the only things you could do, was go to the pictures on base or pictures in town on weekend or go to a dance on Saturday night, Friday or Saturday night. That was it. Not much else but also at that time, that’s right, I went home on leave once and came back and I brought my .22 rifle with me and you could go round some of the neighbouring properties and shoot their rabbits for them. I used to do a bit of that.

Yeah I like shooting the rabbits. I like shooting

vermin you know and but the thing is with the instrument training, because I’d already done fitting and turning and electrical bits I found it a breeze. So much so that part of the training is filing and you had to make a spanner, spanner about so long. You had to make that spanner, amongst other things, and I found that so easy because

I’d done the training before. I made a set for meself at the same time.

A typical day? Well a typical day, well Wagga was a fairly large base and the airstrip itself was up right up one end of it and there was a working area between the airstrip, hangars and so on, between that

and the railway line, main Sydney Wagga railway line, what they called the working area. That’s where all the working went on. All your day-to-day work. No matter who you were, what you were, everything was up there and you would march from that area over the railway line down to the living area, where the parade ground was and everything, for lunch and also marched you’d start off at the parade ground of a morning, well after breakfast. Oh this is interesting. For breakfast,

coming from Richmond, Richmond when you walked into the air men’s mess you got your plate, your took your knife, fork, spoon. You walked down and you sat down at a place at the tables where there was benches or chairs or whatever. You sat down there, ate your meal and you’d go and get a mug and drink of tea or coffee and when we got to Wagga Wagga we walked into the, nobody warned us, walked into the mess that night,

“Where’s the knife and forks?” “You’ve got to provide your own,” somebody said. We had none. So we’re using the top off a pickle jar to eat your meal and things like this or your fingers or whatever and that went on until the Saturday and we got weekend leave. We’d go into Wagga and buy some cutlery and I’ve still got the

knife. I’m not [sure, but] I think I’ve still got the fork somewhere but yeah, that was an interesting period but anyway and then the living area was closer to the main highway than the airstrip. So you’d have your breakfast. You all had to be dressed properly, go into the mess, have your breakfast. You’d come back, clean your teeth or whatever go onto the parade ground by 8 o’clock. Form up. It was by this time you you’re doing instruments, someone else is doing armaments and they’re all in their little groups and

you marched up to the working area and you might go into a classroom type thing and do theory for the start of it. Then you might be morning or an hour then you go into the working area and you started to make these things and chipping wood or cast iron blocks with a chisel, learning all these things and I’d already done all that. So it was a breeze for me, that part of it and even part of the electrical theory we were learning I’d already learnt that. That was easy and then

you’d march back for lunch and then that was there was almost a mutiny there at one time. As we were marching back to lunch one day cause you you’re marching down in columns in all these groups in great column marching down, probably fifteen hundred men, and word coming back from the start somewhere, “Take your lunch and chuck it in the bin.” “Take your lunch and chuck it in the bin.” “Take your lunch and chuck it in the bin.” “What’s goin’ on here?”

So yeah, “All right, we will,” and we get down to the air men’s mess and we’re forming up there before we’re dismissed to go in and we weren’t dismissed. “There’s something strange here.” Next thing the commanding officer comes out and they hurriedly made some sort of a platform to stand on and he gets up, starts to shout out, “I’ve heard about what you were planning to do and my advice is to you for God’s sake don’t do it. I’ve heard

also what caused this to happen, so you’ll find when you walk in now to find the meal it will be a nice meal. Don’t chuck it away. It’d be stupid if you do and I promise you you’ll have nice meals from now on and I’ve dealt with the problem that caused all this.” Then we were dismissed to go in and pick up it was a nice meal. Beautiful meal. Sat down and ate it. What we learned later on was the fact that the catering officer had been selling off the

rations to whoever and we were eating what was left over, the junk so to speak and it got that bad that people were, the men were group I don’t know who started it but the whole group at one stage was ready to go mutiny against just was a type a mutiny. Just take the meal, throw it in the bin, walk out again. Go on a hunger strike if you like. Not to eat this junk but that was the story of that, that

we had good meals from then on. These things happen.

I can’t remember exactly now. It was about another nine months or something like that and then the postings come up and this, while I was there, there was you go to the you have to go to the notice board every day because there’s station standing orders, daily routine orders and then special orders.

So the standing orders you had to learn them off by heart what you could, couldn’t do. The daily routine orders might be because they’re painting this particular place you go somewhere else or things like that but the special orders come up and when you finish your course you go into what they call ‘pool’. You don’t belong to anybody in pool. They just you do all sorts of stupid things like we were folding blankets. We’d go into a store and there’s a mountain as big as this house of blankets. So you fold

all the blankets, put ’em in a neat pile for about a week or something and every day you go back and look at these special orders cause you know your postings are coming through somewhere. You’re going somewhere but you’re in pool until that happens and then the next time you go in there, “Wow, the postings are up.” I’m off to Amberley in Queensland. Number 3 Aircraft Depot.

“Oh well that’s Amberley, Queensland.” Never been there. Somewhere to

go. Something to do. You know off to a big adventure. So travel on the train, which seemed to take ages to get there. Picked up at the railway station with a truck and come out to Amberley base and move into the air men’s quarters, which weren’t too bad. They were again the wartime army hut type a things but instead of having a room to yours well at Wagga we were, at Wagga we were two to a room

but at Richmond we were one to a room and two to a room and then you got to Amberley I think we were something like eight to a hut or something like that. Just one big hut.

Oh well, get used to it. There’s things you have to get used to and just like when you go for a shower. You walk into a shower, it’s just a big tin shed with a couple a dozen showers in it. No divisions

anywhere and you all strip off and get in there and you all have a shower. Same with the toilets. You that was a strange thing to me when I first got to Ballarat. Walk into the toilets and they’re just one row of pans that side, one row of pans that side. That’s it. In a big tin shed with windows, a couple a doors and then we started work. I was working in the aircraft depot there and AD [aircraft depots] they call ’em, 3 AD,

and I got a job overhauling ‘Type 35 controls’ they called ’em. Little control about that size that had a timer on it you could set, so many minutes and what it was that the Lincolns were taking off doing exercises and they had cameras set up to photograph on the instruments, instrument banks. These cameras

took a photograph every so many minutes and this timer was to control the rate of these photographs and I don’t know how long the film was for these cameras. I don’t know what the cameras looked like even at that time but that’s another thing I learnt on the instrument course. I learnt about cameras. How to repair cameras and this sort and how to use them. All things about photography cause that was one of the things you had to repair

and I got this type 35 control and they had to be overhauled after every exercise. Take ’em right apart, every last screw and nut and everything else and clean everything up, put ’em all back together again and lightly oil or grease the working parts. Get another one. Do all that one and then another one and do all that and then another one. That’s all I did. Overhauled these type 35 controls and then finally,

I’m not sure exactly when I made out the application when they called for volunteers to aircrew training but I had the interview at Wagga and one reason I went in and the commanding officer there and a couple a others saying, “Well why do you want to go in the aircrew corps?” I thought, “Well I want to get on in this air force. If I stay where I am I’ll probably finish up a sergeant but you’re all aircrew. You’re all officers. I’ll finish up an officer or something. I want to do something.”

They thought that was a good idea. So that was the interview and then it took a lot a time to go through and by that time I was at Amberley and I wasn’t there an awful long time and then I was transferred from there to Williamtown air base outside of Newcastle to work on Mustangs, big photograph here, Mustang fighters and I got into the routine there working on

them. That was a pretty rough sort of a base that one at the time. It was built during the war and everything was still wartime sort of stuff and that’s where I started to get into the competitive side of shooting cause they had a sort of a rifle team there. We’d go into, I can’t remember the name of it, Adamtown. They got Adamtown there’s a rifle range. We used to go in there once a week. Do some shooting.

Come back.

Any of the instruments, any of ’em at all. Either serviced them where they were or take them out, bring them back to the workshop and repair, overhaul, whatever. Gun sights and all kinds a things. The some of ’em are not easy to get out because with aircraft, they’re not like a motor car, with aircraft there’s something behind, something behind, something to make

up use of the every available space and military aircraft are built for a purpose and that’s not for joy riding. That’s they’re built for a purpose and there’s only just enough room for a pilot and that’s about all and there’s either instruments or controls or something very close around him and some of the instruments were you had to take out a big electrical box. They had electricians that’d come in and take that before you could get at the thing that worked something else up here.

They’re very involved some of it. The gun sight was sitting up in front. course that was easy to take off. You take that off and take it into the workshop and or some of the things like gauges in the panel. You’d have to take them out and there’d be oil pressure gauges, some of the oil pressure gauges you could take out, test it with a equipment alongside the aircraft. It was okay, you could put it back in again or sometimes didn’t even have to take it out. You just disconnect it from the engine

and hook it up, test it and all those sort of things.

At that stage well yeah, I… I’d already applied to go into aircrew but I sort of was taking so long I forgot about it. A bit like that rowing boat I built. I started to forget about it and then one interesting thing there was that I wanted to buy a motorbike, so I could ride down to Sydney weekends. Not that

far to Sydney. So I thought, “If I buy a motorbike I can ride home.” So a chap had a he lived at Cessnock. He had a motorbike for sale. So I went home with him one Friday, Friday night, had a look at the bike on the Saturday and everything else and I said, “Oh yeah, I’ll take that.” So I thought, “Righto, I’ll…” you could easily ride from Cessnock to Williamtown. “So I’ll ride I’ll start early Monday

morning.” Got there all right. I didn’t get very far. I got to Maitland, no, even before I got to Maitland the chain broke and luckily it was opposite a farm house, so and the farmer was awake and got in there and I told him my sad story. So he helped me mend the chain. On my way again I got as far as Maitland and the chain broke again. So I went into a, by this time the shops were open Monday mornings, by this time I’m running late. Should a

been on parade at 8 o’clock and it was pouring rain all this time by the way. Pouring rain. So I bought a new chain, put it on and it broke somewhere along the line. I had to fix that. I had I bought the tools to fix the chain there and I finally got on the air base probably about 10 o’clock, something like that cause I would a been AWL [Absent Without Leave] in trouble but

it was pouring rain all this time and I put the bike, parked in where the air men could park their vehicles and changed my clothes and reported for duty at the instrument workshop and the sergeant there was a good fella. I told him what happened. He said, “Oh you’re damn lucky. There’s no parade this morning because of the rain.” So no parade, no worries but then when the chap turned up for his money for the bike I said, “I’m not buyin’ the damn

thing. It kept breakin’ the chain all the time.” He said, “How could it break the chain?” I said, “I don’t know but it did. You try it.” It did. So I didn’t buy the bike. So it wasn’t long after that that word came through that I’d been accepted for aircrew training and I had to clear out. Now clear out, when you move into a base like that you clear in. That means you get a piece of paper. You had to take it around to various places, say to get your blanket issue,

to get some other issue, do something and do something else, do something else, get you had to get all these signatures. Probably only about half a dozen of ’em but when you clear out you had to go about two dozen places, hand back equipment if you’ve got it, get the signatures for it. If you didn’t have it you’d have to pay for it or “Please explain” and these places are all over the base. Like there might be armoury over there where you hand your rifle back in and somewhere

over there the kit store you hand your blankets back in and you and I had to get out by 1 o’clock. I had to catch the 1 o’clock bus from the it pulled up at the base. Had to get out 1 o’clock bus to catch the train to start my journey to Victoria, Point Cook, and I was literally running on air flat out to try and clear out. Get all these signatures, get all the gear back in. Finally made it. Packed all my gear in a kit bag and off the bus just before it pulled out. Just made it

and then get to Point Cook. Again, there was a train station Laverton. Yes, Laverton was the railway station. Hopped on the back of another air force truck into Point Cook and lo and behold we got brick blocks again. Beautiful. Brick blocks. One man to a room. Lovely. Two storey. It was a permanent base, actually the first base built for the air force, Point Cook, and that started a whole

new world then. Drill and more drill, lectures and more lectures. You’re learning all about general aircrew stuff and you had to you had a photograph I’ve got there with the room and all the text books lined up, all the subjects you had to learn about. Weather for aircrew, armaments, medicine, all these sort of things you didn’t dream about. It’s like one of the questions I can remember was, “If you

were sent to a certain area,” was just a big paddock somewhere, open fields, “and you had to establish an air base what would you do in order, first priorities?” What would you do? Well for some reason or other that sort of stuck to me from the course we had to do. You must have water, fresh water, and store it somewhere. You must have fresh food and store it somewhere or even tinned food or dried food. You’ve got to store that somewhere and a lot of people start

to go on [about] aircraft fuel, food, bombs and everything. The third thing is latrines. You must have latrines of some kind, probably even go to the top. Must but water is easily the first. If there’s no water there, forget about it or if you can’t get water. Now latrines and that’s always stuck with my mind because in many cases no matter what you see, you see a movie somewhere or you see a play or you see something happening it still goes through my mind, “Where’s the latrines?”

It really does. That’s amazing and people forget about that but very important.

How do you mean ‘sharing’?

Oh no, that was that was not the men’s, or boys as they call it, but that was the authorities. That was what they decided and that’s what was done.

Well I prefer the, yeah I did prefer the separate room because when you’re all in one hut like at Ballarat when we got in the second stage of aircrew training, you’re all in one big long hut and there’s just beds and lockers and if somebody comes home late at night and bone drunk as a lord and singing his supper well you put up with it. It’s like if you’re in a large family and somebody comes home and

bangs the door and thumps up the stairs and all this sort a thing, wakes up the whole household, well you all put up with that. Or someone gets a radio and there was one radio. You had to get that checked by the electrical and radio people, and had to have a certificate to say you had the base and everything else. So we used to listen to the radio but you only listened to what the owner wanted to listen to.

No. No, I just

thought, “Well I’m going to get a pair of silver wings here.” Pair of silver wings. “Yeah, lovely. Be a pilot.” Ah that didn’t come through either cause what happened was, they had so many intake, I think there was about a hundred or something like that. There was a dozen from the navy, serving navy I think they were. May not have been, but anyway they’re from the navy and the rest were you know, air force and a lot were straight out of civvie street and there was a few like meself from serving air men

and what had happened apparently was that my name and my education put me right down in the bottom of the list cause there’s some people there with started university courses and others had finished their finished the what we call here the senior certificate or New South Wales leaving certificate. I’d only finished three years of high school. So I was sort of down the list as far as education was concerned, although the fact that

I was instrument repairer put me up a bit and but even so, apparently I was right down about the below the cut-off line for that particular intake. I probably would have made the next one but I was below that bottom line on intake and then apparently one of the civilian intake chaps changed his mind, which put me one up and I was in and that was good I thought and the strange thing there too,

I just remembered something else. I don’t know if you realise this, and many people don’t, that the ranks of the aircrew at that time was following the Royal Air Force. Now Australia for some reason follows other country’s footsteps. Even now we’re following the Yanks and [then] they follow the Royal Air Force. For aircrew, I’m not sure when it started, somewhere round about ’48 I think, aircrew had laurel wreaths instead of stripes

for NCO [Non-Commissioned Officers] aircrew and as trainee aircrew we had these laurel things, there’s a photograph there I’ll show you later, with nothing in the middle and once you graduated you got one star and as you’re promoted you got a second star and a and then you got a third star but that was wiped later on. It was wiped after the Korean War started. About must be about ’51 I think,

cause when I graduated I was a sergeant with stripes, although during the training period we still had these laurel wreath things.

Oh in Point Cook? Do you mind if I look up something there?

You want to hold it?

I can’t remember the exact time now.

Oh we knew war was on but that was over there. You know that’s way over there. Over the other side of the world. Who cares about that, but as things started to hot up a bit we knew that graduates from the previous pilot’s course were being killed. So that didn’t worry us much either. That was them. That we weren’t. We were all right.

No.

Didn’t worry at all. I get more worried now when I start to take the car out of the…, take it out of the drive than I did then cause I was young and silly I suppose, that’s the other thing.

Yeah there was accidents, yeah. Well to get through this training there’s three grades. You all go in together. I can’t remember how for how long now but you all do the same lectures,

the same exams and everything else. You do quite a lot of subjects and then you have an exam and then they split off what they call pilot navigators at the top. They’re the cream. Underneath that, right down the bottom were the signallers or radio operator/air gunner. They changed it radio operator/air gunner to a signaller for some reason, following the Royal Air Force again. So then the pilot navigator they had to learn to fly or see

who could learn to fly out of these pilot navigators but if I can digress for a minute on that, when we were at Wagga, Wagga Wagga, we all had to as air men all had to learn how to start a Tiger Moth engine. You remember the old Tiger Moths? Well there’s a starting procedure for them and they were still using those at training

and there’s still a lot of ’em around and we all had to learn how to start the engines, cause there’s no self starter. You had to swing a prop. So there’d be somebody sit in the cockpit, usually the sergeant or actually a pilot or one of the aircrew, engine fitters and you’d go through the starting procedure, which was…

Yeah well

At that stage all the air men had to learn how to start the engine of a Tiger Moth, cause there’s no electric starter on them and the procedure was somebody sitting in the cock pit, had to be an engine fitter or a pilot. The procedure was “switches off.” You had to you shouted out all this. “Switches off.”

Well that means you could spin that propeller by hand. Well you can’t spin it, move it and you move it into position so that you could reach up and hold it and then he’d shout out, “Suck in.” So you’d give it a couple of swings and you’d get it in the right position again and then he’d yell out, “Switches on.” You don’t do anything yet and he’d yell out, “Contact.” You’d reach up,

swing it and if everything’s done right it’ll start. If there’s anything wrong you’d get your head cut off and you could easily cause you had to swing and swing yourself away from the spinning propeller.

Well I didn’t have to, but I did. Yeah I’m comin’ to that one. That’s a thorn in my side actually.

Yeah, I’ll explain it later.

Yeah, that’s the interesting thing with

Wagga and then that was an aside from Point Cook. Then we went…

We were back at Point Cook.

Yeah. I split off these pilot navigators and I’ve got some good photographs of, well training was first of all Tiger Moths. Now with the pilot navigators they had to they paired off again. You had a mate, although I didn’t do that. I went onto the signalling bit.

I learned more about other subjects while we were still there. They were doing this, we were learning more about weapons. Machine guns and all turrets and all that and one trainee pilot would hop in the cock pit of the Tiger Moth. The other one would be his offsider or I don’t know what the proper name for it was, but there was signals like tap the head, tap the shoulder cause there’s no radio communication and

that means to start the engine, pull the chocks away or, “I need assistance.” So that was all taught there and then each of the pilot navigator, that’s what you were called then. You were a P/N in front of your name then. I became a TS, trainee signaller. So the PNs [Pilot Navigator] they’d learn a bit of flying and the ones that looked promising they’d stay as pilots. The ones that didn’t look promising they became navigators

and there was a couple of the pilots killed there during the training and…

Well I don’t know why they crashed but they did something wrong and sometimes the aircraft engine’d cut out and there’d been a few forced landings. The engine the aircraft’d be written off but the pilot’d be okay but there were a few killed. When that happened they closed

the post office. So we couldn’t give out any names until the next of kin was notified, which I don’t know why, but anyone would want to do that but when the post office opened before it got to the newspapers or the newsreel, no TV but news reel, you’d send a telegram to Mum. “I’m okay, Mum.” That’s it and Wirraway. After the Tiger Moths, they graduated to Wirraways

the pilots. The navigators’d be finished (UNCLEAR). The pilots’d go on to Wirraways and there’s one Wirraway came in, I don’t know where or why, but I remember him coming in one time at Point Cook a permanent base had a lot a trees lining the main roads and things around. We were actually doing something out on one of the lawns one day. Having a class, instruction. The next thing bang through these trees comes this Wirraway and the wings flying around and made a bit of a mess of it.

The pilot was all right. I think he was finished up as a navigator that one. Yeah.

Friction? No, I wouldn’t say there was any friction. There might have been disappointment by some of the navigators at the time. May have been disappointment to me that I was right down the bottom as a lowly signaller so to speak but no, when you started on with your course you soon forgot all about that. You concentrated on the job you were doing.

Ah oh when the end of the exam, this initial exam and you were split off into pilot/navigators or signallers. I thought, “Oh well there goes me silver wings. I won’t have a pair of silver wings any more. I’ll only have one wing. Fly lopsided.” Yeah.

Well if you think of the [names], what they used to be called, wireless operator/air gunner, gives a truer picture

and in that you learned to operate the radios that were in the aircraft at that time that had a signaller on board. No don’t worry about Mustangs, cause it’s only a pilot but we had other aircraft where there was more than one crew and if one of those crew was a signaller or a wireless operator/air gunner you learned to operate the various types of radio equipment and they were different in the Lincoln bombers we had

and the to what was in the DC3s or C47 Dakotas. You learned all that. You learned about the radar equipment that was in it. You learned to operate the radar equipment and that was your job for the radio part of it, radio and radar, but you also, later on, you learnt the gunnery but the radio we went to Ballarat for that.

So after I split off into signallers the pilot/navigators stayed at Point Cook, signallers went to Ballarat, Victoria. So we got there and that was a, as I say, there’s wartime base and there’s open huts with just a row of toilet pans that side and toilet pans that side and that’s the sort of life there and there’s row of beds down each side of another hut and that’s where if somebody had a radio you listened to what they wanted to listen to or plugged your ears or if you wanted to listen to somethin’ else

you just bad luck and yeah you had guard duty, rostered for guard duty, and fire duty. They had a fire truck there and they our quick lecture about how to work the things on the fire truck, the pumps and the water connections and all that sort a thing. How to run hoses out and like a fireman and you’re learning the radio and radar at Ballarat. Took quite a while there. That was the longest part of the whole course, at Ballarat.

Ah I made some, yeah, a couple a good friends. I was best man at one of the chap’s wedding. Another one was best man at my wedding later on, yeah.

Well totally different actually. One chap, he was, I called him ‘upper crust’. He probably wasn’t but he had a upper crust voice about him, know what I mean, but we were good friends and he was Catholic to the core and of course

I was just the opposite and but we got on very well though and the other chap, we were much very similar in our outlooks and beliefs and everything else but religion didn’t come into it. If it did, well, you’d be in big trouble to try and make it something. You just had to put up with all the jokes and the slang and yahooing. Whatever else went on.

No, I’ve never been religious. I always believed that there’s a god somewhere or something like that but I don’t…

I’ve seen enough and experienced enough to realise that a lot of it’s all bull. A lot of it’s man made.

Well it was strange there because we had a commanding officer who was not a flying man. The only commanding officer I know who wasn’t a flying man. He was an engineer I think, Wing Commander Reynolds, and he ran a very tight ship as they say and if ya the order

of the day was to wear over coats buttoned and hooked, you wore an over coat which buttoned up and hooked to the neck. You didn’t leave it open. You’d be in trouble if you did and he’d come through and he’d CO’s [Commanding Officer’s] inspection and that particular CO inspection we had to stand by the beds. Not like at the original ones where you went out and did drill or something while they went through. Stand by your beds and he’d be looking for all kinds of things and sometimes, I think one of the chaps had a bed that rocked a bit and he put a

soft drink bottle top under one a the legs to stop it rocking you know and he was there one day and he spotted this top. “Is that a Ballarat Bertie?” cause if it was, that’s a beer bottle. You’d be in real trouble bringing alcohol onto the base. So the chap said, “No sir.” “What is it then?” He had to go and get it out. It was lemonade or something like that. “What’s it there for?” and he said, “Well look, without it the bed rocks.” “Hmmm. All right.” Away he went.

Pardon?

Mean? Was he mean? In some ways yeah, very mean. He had two hates. He hated Catholics and aircrew and my mate was both a Catholic and an aircrew. So he copped it.

Oh he always picked on him. Extra duties or something like that you know. Guard duties. Yeah.

Oh not that I know. I suppose I was I

did something which was considered out a line until it was explained cause the thing is there the well when you’re young you look go to the dances. So we used to go into Ballarat weekends to go to the dance and you meet girls there and most of the girls we met there, actually Ballarat at that time had a surplus of women and most of the girls were going through nursing training cause Ballarat Base Hospital was a big nurse training thing. So most of the girls we knew were nurses, or trainee nurses. So they were trainees and we were trainees

and I remember one time after we’d threw in some money cause the hut, we were a fairly cooperative group in the hut, and the washing facilities were quite primitive. Primitive in the fact that all there was was a heap of wood out there and a few axes and some old solid fuel-burning coppers in iron stands out in the open. Nothing under cover.

So if you wanted to wash some clothes, and this is funny cause this was the one place where some of the fellas had to wash their clothes for the first time cause those living in Melbourne doing crew training in Point Cook, well, their mother would do it while they were home on weekend and that sort a thing but here you had to go out and chop some wood. Lucky to find an axe that didn’t have a broken handle. Chop the wood and light a fire under one of these coppers and carry the water to it from a tap and a bucket and put your clothes in it.

Some bloke said, “How much soap do you put in this?” and he’d be emptying the packet in. “How much soap do you put in this?” “Oh that’ll be enough.” “Right.” Put in a whole packet of Persil soap in a copper. Then you ball your clothes up and you’d have to carry them from there to tub somewhere to rinse them out but the thing, the joke of a thing was that these fellows had so much soap in the copper than when it all cooled off it was jelly. You had to turn the whole, tip the whole thing over and tip it upside down to get the jelly out of the

copper before you could use it. Very primitive set up but then we said, “This is no good,” and at that time there was a little washing machine, Little Hoover I think it was called. Little very small washing machine, only about so square. It stood about so high and had a little impeller built into the side of the thing. That’s all that moved in it and so we’d all decided to chip in and buy one of these for the hut, which we did. Forty

five pound I think it cost and then we used to charge people from other huts two shillings each to wash their clothes if they wanted to use it to wash their clothes. We had a quite a bit, quite a business going there and when we all graduated and moved we had enough money to put on a wing-ding [sumptuous] party from that washing machine. So we had a thing there but the after we finished all the

ground lectures that from the radio and the radar, they brought in a flying classroom, which was with a Dakota fitted up with just radios and seats. So you could put a dozen trainees in there and you’d take off. You’d learn radio procedure and you’d learn it was different trying to do things flying around rather than on the ground and running out of time. He says, “Give a position report.” You don’t want to be over Melbourne when you’re supposed to be over Sydney or something like that and the crack

procedure talking to air traffic controllers and other aircraft both by voice and by radio telephone, Morse code. Morse code was probably one of the longest things you had to learn or the longest time to learn it. You had to read it, send it and very seldom used these days. So radio telephony, WT [Wireless Transmission] was wireless, that’s Morse code. The voice and…

Well that’s quite interesting that cause you walk into the lecture you know not knowing the first thing about it. You know it’s got dots and dashes and things and the lecturer says, “Oh yes, they’re called dots and dashes but you can forget about that. They call them dit dahs. Dits and dahs.” So an a is de dah and a b is dah de de dit and a d is da dit dit and an f is der di dur de dit. K is dur de dur. Q is easy to remember, that’s queen. Remember that old thing. Dah dah

de dah. That’s a queen. Da dah de dah. Dash dash dot dash. Dah dah de dah. So you learn it that way. Da de da de dah de dit dit de da dit dit dah.

Yeah. Thirty two words a minute. That’s what we had to reach, thirty-two words a minute. I didn’t quite reach the thirty two words a minute but I could do thirty and, that’s my transmission, and transmission they said was very clear.

Very clear. So that they allowed me that although I didn’t reach thirty two, but oh sometimes it’d come back at forty words a minute, very fast, and if there’s always a gap between the letters. It’s you have to always have that otherwise it’s just one mish mash but it’d come back very fast and there’s a thing they called a ‘bug’ and the normal

transmission is with a key. Pressing the key and each person no matter who they are or where they are or what religion they are, what race they are, they develop a ‘fist’ as they call it and that was used in code breaking during the Second World War cause they knew that if a message was sent by a particular fist from there. So later on from there they knew that whatever it was coming from had moved from there to there.

Just by identifying that fist. It’s a bit like handwriting. Your handwriting is different from somebody else’s but just you wouldn’t think so, but you can. You can pick it. When you get to know the idea of it and you’re sending Morse code and listening to Morse code you can you’re understanding and pick that fist. You can say, “Oh that’s Billy again, yeah. How Billy.”

Yeah, you knew who you were talking to just by their fist but this bug as they called it

the weather’s, weather used to be transmitted continuously from various centres around the world and weather’s very important for aircrew. You don’t want to fly into a storm if you don’t have to, or you don’t want to fly or an air base is closed because of fog or something like that. So that weather’s being broadcast continually and it they’re in numbers. That comes through very fast. Like one is four dits and a dah. Dit dit dit dah.

Well then you come onto or, the other way around is it? Yeah, it’s the other way round. It’s dah dah dah dit. You’ve gotta count four or five dots and when you’ve got five, five is all dots. Dit dit dit dit and when you go onto a six that’s de de de dah. Seven is de de de dah dah and this is coming through very fast, usually about forty words a minute. Well to send it that fast, instead of trying do this. After while you have a wrist ache, that’s probably why my wrist aches now, they had a

bug and you could put your hand on a bench and your finger and thumb, finger for the dits and the thumb for the dahs and you could come send that very fast.

Pardon?

That key?

Well a Morse key it sits on a base. Something about that size.

Usually of insulating material and two terminals to the wires and an arm coming out with a little knob on the end of it and there’s a rocker in the middle somewhere or towards the end and a pair a contacts. When you pressed it down it made contacts. You released it, it made no contacts. So when you pressed it down while you held it down it’d just send a continuous tone and that was used for direction finding,

that’s one of the things in radio you learn. You have a direction finder. You call up a base, say if you’re in fog you don’t know where you are, it’s lost and you call up a base and the radio direction is, “Hold your key down for half a minute,” or something and that base would pick up that transmission and then they could give you a direction from that point. You do it another one over there and a third one, triangulation you know “Well where those lines

intersect that’s where I am.” So if you held it down you got continuous transmission but if you just dit dit dah dah dah dah dit. Depending on how long you held it down for that’s just a three little shorts one, three de de de dit dah dah dah de de dit dah or dah de dah dah de dah dah der der de dit.

Oh yeah.

You have to…

You have to translate from printed or written word on an order or position report or enemy report or whatever. As you’re reading it you’re reading, say ‘raining’. So that you’re reading raining. It’s de der de dit de der de dit der der dit der dit der dit der der dit. That’s raining.

Simple sentence? Yeah.

Well I’ll do it now.

Well all right. ‘It’s raining’ again. De der de dit de dit der dit der der dit dit dit der der dit.

Oh yeah. Of course it was. Like any other job in aircrew. There are lots of things you had to learn and then you’re coming through. You’re listening to somebody and there’s all air crackle and things on the radio and you’re trying think about well procedure too,

radio procedure was you could contact someone, particularly with the radio, with the key Morse code. You’re contacting other aircraft or traffic control or another base somewhere and you’d send a message like in voice it would be, “Richmond control. This is Fox Queen Able. Queen Able Mary.”

Well that’s different now, they’ve phonetics changed now but what that means is, “What’s the weather like at your air base?” A QAM as they call it, a Q-A-M. QAM but basically before that you’d say, “QRS4, QRK,” which means, “What’s my volume like? What’s my intellig? Is it intelligible?” and if it come back, “QRS4, QRS5,” well you know you’ve got good communication. If it came back, “3,”

not so good, “2,” bull you can’t read it at 2. 3’s horrible. You can’t read it at all at 1. So 3’s about the lowest you could go to maintain communications. So you when you got that Q code going QRS, QRK then you could start to send your message or receive a message. You’d have to write down the message you receive and also write down the message you send and keep a time log. You had a log book. Had it all had to be logged. So if you contact

somebody you sent the time, whatever it was.

How did they know when?

Oh well pass exams. Like every other thing, you pass exams. Some and oh you do a practical exam. Like I say, I only got to thirty words a minute instead of thirty two, although it was so clear they passed it.

Another trick, a naughty trick really, but when those flying classroom they had, they had the radios and the radios were the type in the Lincolns and Lancasters, Marconi type 1155, and you were sitting in front of that setting it up and everything else. You’re probably talking to somebody and the instructor’d come down and say, “Look,” he’d give you something, “Here, take this up to the bloke up the front there.”

Well the first time you don’t realise what’s going on. Second time you wake up but while you’re away up the front of the aircraft taking this thing up he’s taken a plug out here or taken a wire out there or something and you come back and say, “Right, send this message.” So crikey you’ve got no con, “I’ve got nothing.” You’ve got indicators to show you what not tuned in. “Oh crikey.” So you’ve got trouble shooting you see. So it depends on how fast you can find the trouble or what it is. Connect the fact that, “This is not

workin’ it must be that.” Well that’s how they sort of they test you out on practical side as well as receiving and sending the Morse. Voice is a lot easier of course. That’s you’ve only got to press buttons to choose channels for that.

Oh yeah. Yeah. It was just the same. Mm. Only sometimes there’s more

urgency to get it done you know and a course when you did the re the armaments you learn all about the armaments you’re using. There’s two examples where? Here.

Well the armaments, the first thing there’s a fifty mill they call ’em .5 or fifty calibre rounding machine gun and that’s the thing there

and the Lincoln held nearly four thousand of those. Yeah. Nearly four thousand of those in a Lincoln. Well the predecessor, the Lancaster well the .303 down there’s much shorter, I think about that long. Well they held fourteen thousand of those and the other one was the twenty millimetre Espano Sweezer. This is a drill model. The hole in it means it’s drill. It’s harmless and that’s it.

That’s the twenty millimetre cannon. That’s in the mid upper turret with the Lincoln and these are in the tail and the nose of the Lincoln. So you had to learn not only about the cartridges and what they do, but the guns. How to strip them, clean them and goodness knows what and clear blockages with your eyes shut or blindfolded cause you’re flying at night and you find that these particular

when they’ve got a stoppage you’ve got to clear it. You can’t see a darn thing in front you’ve got to know by touch where everything is. This particular or take this one, the .5, fifty calibre that’s mainly a lump a lead with a copper sheeting but there’s all kinds of others. There’s the armour piercing, high explosive, the incendiary. Tracer. They’re all made up into belts. Every fifth one usually is a tracer. Depends where you are, what you’re doing. Every tenth one may be a high explosive

or may be a lot of armour piercing or so on but the 20 mill cannon, this is this one’s lump of steel. They call it a solid shot. That’s got a flat nose with a sharp edge around it and the idea of the flat nose is that the aircraft usually curves all over the place so that if it was projectile like this one and it hit like that it would ricochet off or might make a dent in it and carry on.

Not do much damage to the enemy aircraft but this one because of that it would dig in and then go in and do a lot of damage and a course these also were made in bore what this they call this one, solid shot. Also made in high explosive, incendiary, armour piecing and this one particular one was made in 1941. September 1941.

I didn’t serve with any of these. I bought these at a gun show one time. It’s funny you know how I handled literally thousands and thousands, probably millions of them. Never, ever thought of putting one in me pocket. It wasn’t until I saw them at a gun show once I bought them.

Well the .5 or fifty calibre, this one, a very common one amongst the allies even in Korea

cause the Mustang had six guns. Three on each wing, firing these and so did the Sabre. The Sabre had six firing these and the guns would be probably two metres long, the barrel about so long and the breech block area an area about that long and so deep and you could change the

mechanism inside, lift the flap. You could change the mechanism each side so they could be fed from the left or from the right. So in the tail turret of the Lincoln you had chutes coming down the bin, the bin held three thousand and forty rounds for the tail and the bin was situated about the rear third of the aircraft. Huge bins just full a these things and from there, there were chutes coming down each side of the aircraft right down

to the tail down and up into the guns and then up into the two guns and to load you’d have to trail these belts all the way down through these chutes and up to the gun. Open up the flap, put the first one in, close the flap and then they just sit there until you actually pull the cocking lever

and then it was shove it into the breech ready for firing and they were very, very common throughout the allied forces and still common. They’re still used by our navy I know. Sometimes you see them on the newsreels where they’re firing a burst in front of a ship to stop it and that’s usually from one of these. They can do a lot of damage but this one that was a Browning, American

design. This is an Espano Sweezer. I’m not sure, made in England but I’m not sure who actually or where Espano Sweezer came from but these had a very delicate feeding mechanism whereas the fifty calibres were fed from belts. These also from belts and they had they called it a belt feed mechanism, like a big canister thing, that sat on top of each gun. You had two of these in the mid upper turret

of the Lincoln and as they came through, there had to be a mechanism because everything was so tight and heavy and large to pull these things out of the belt, drop it into the breech area and they’d use either the head of a spring to push it into the chamber or when you’re loading it for the first time you’d have to draw up some compressed air from the aircraft system and if you wanted to load guns, these,

you had to get everything ready, make sure your turret was turned direction along the line of the aircraft. So you could pull up your hose and reach over and plug it into the air supply. Then call up the skipper. “Skipper, mid upper turret. Can I use some air?” “Yeah, use some air.” Cause they use air for the brakes and other things. So you’d bleed some air off and it’d work this breech feed mechanism to load the guns

and from there on they’d load as they were firing but to learn how to use that air but they the cannons themselves they were about three metres long I think. Huge things and the breech area quite large and if you had to undo the breech plug and take the breech block out, you had a tool with two arms, it’d be about one and a half metres in total length, and

a pad in the middle. So you put that up against your stomach and you had to un… start to undo this breech plug so that when you got to the point where it was out of the gun itself when you had the spring behind it, it was all up already up against your stomach. If you didn’t do that it’d probably go right through ya there was that much tension in that spring, which was to force that into the chamber of the gun but one trip back from operations at one time,

one of them actually unscrewed by itself, one of these breech plugs, and just missed my head as it come back cause you’ve got two guns there. That was one of those things. It was all over before I knew about it. Yeah but as we learnt about those and you learn air to ground firing. It was at East Sale we did the air gunnery part, at East Sale, and you take off in

Lincolns. Oh we did the graduation bit, got our wings. Graduated at Ballarat. Got our S wings. Put the sergeant stripes up. That was after we’d been to East Sale though. You got to East Sale and learning more about guns again. Cleaning, assembling, disassembling, making up the belts and then you take off and you

do air to ground. I don’t know how big the patch of ground was really on the ground but you used to lie over it and you had to learn how to aim off. So if you want to hit that you start firing here sort of thing. If you aimed at it, well the shot would go out there and then the air raft would be doing all sorts of other funny things. One technical manoeuvre they call corkscrew. You had to corkscrew then there’s a formula you learn, particularly if you’re in the tail

turret, that if the aircraft was doing, say, from twelve to three o’clock you’d be aiming in a particular direction off, aiming off. Once it got through the other four positions of a clock there was four other positions you would have to aim to allow for the movement of the aircraft that way but also allow for it going forward. So you had to learn all that and then the air to air firing, as the aircraft would tow a ‘drogue’ as they called it,

it’s usually bright orange or something, tow behind the aircraft and you’d be firing at that and that’s where I learnt that don’t take much notice of tracers. You’d see the tracers going right through it and when afterwards when it’s on the ground you’re trying find holes in it, there’s none there. The tracer went somewhere else. That’s how they tested whether you’re a good gunner or not to see whether, particularly air to air, cause they’d only be just flying straight along and you aim off the main thing in there was aiming off

but on the ground you’re doing funny things there and…

Beg your pardon?

No, they all got that part of it all right. Yeah, they all graduated. Mmmm.

Morse code was one. Learning that. Radio theory. Had to learn what radio is, what makes it work. What stops it working and all that.

I don’t know. I think it’s just plain theory, that people didn’t like doing theory. Like going back to school, learning new theory on a strange subject.

Oh yeah, Ballarat.

Oh yeah that was at Ballarat. That was in the latter half of Ballarat. We bought a washing machine and I told you all about that. Well we also all threw in and bought an old

car, it was actually a T model Ford, and I was the only one that could knew anything about T model Fords. So I became the chief driver and everything else and we used to go into town in that and go a few places around and I remember at one stage, I’m not sure why but we couldn’t actually or most of the chaps couldn’t go out on leave. So I volunteered to go into town, pick up a car load a nurses

and bring ’em out to the base but the Ballarat, a bit like Amberley used to be. I don’t know if you know the old Amberley. It the main road used to go straight across the run way at Amberley air base one time. It doesn’t now, it goes around. Well Ballarat was like that. The road into the base went straight across the airstrip and they had, for some reason or other they had the main gate and the guard house on the main entrance but for some

reason some bright spark decided to have a guard house further down on the other side of the airstrip and there was telephone there and you used to take turns at being on guard there and this particular time I brought the car out and I thought, “Well, I can’t go through the main gate because I’ll be on the base and that’s against the rules.” So I had the car load of nurses, and I think they were all in their nurse uniform from memory,

and I came out. Stopped at the guard at right out near the strip. No problem there. Went up to the main gate. Stopped there but between that little guard house and the main guard driving towards the main gate out comes the commanding officer in his car into town. Well next day, that was all right, nothing was said then. Next day I’m up before on a charge of bringing females onto the base without permission.

So they started to read out the charge and everything and then get to the point “You anything to say?” I said, “Yes sir. I always understood the main gate to be the edge, the end or the beginning of the base. Is that correct?” “Yes.” I said, “Well I didn’t bring ’em through the main gate. They were outside in the car.” “Oh. Case dismissed,” but the CO, because he saw ’em in the car, I suppose he assumed

that they went onto the base but they didn’t cause they must a questioned the guards that were on duty that time and I didn’t go through the gate.

Yeah these

Well I got the red log book there. So that’s called a milk run. To go to Dubbo, back to Sydney. You go to Amberley and back to Sydney and while we’re the other trip might go to Toowoomba then go to Sale. Parafield South Australia and then over to Perth and this sort of thing just delivering stuff, picking up stuff until I went to Korea.

Well there’s a book also here called The Australians in Korea if you come across that one. Mostly it was pretty hum drum sort of stuff but oh sometimes things scared the pants off you. The scariest thing I think for me two, two things. I talk about GCA or Ground Controlled Approach. Do you understand what that is?

I’d better tell the man from Mars about that.

Well ground controlled approach as it was then, it’s much more sophisticated today, but when you arrive over an air field you can’t see it, full of fog. You can’t see it, you know it’s down there somewhere in amongst mountains or telegraph poles and all sorts of nasty things but you’ve got to land there. You just have to land there. So what they did both in Korea and in Japan they had these ground controlled approach systems set up, which is a radar controlled thing, and you’d be set in

a stack, five hundred feet between the aircraft, which is not very much. You had to very careful of your height and you would circle around on a set course over an air base until your turn came. There might be ten, twenty in your stack and the GCA’d call up and give you a turn just to identify you. So if they say, “Turn port twenty degrees two minutes,” you’d have to go that and, “Yes, I’ve got you now.” Then they could follow that particular aircraft on their screen.

Once you’re identified then you come down certain courses to miss mountains or telegraph poles or whatever for certain times and you come back and you’re supposed to finish up lined up with the airstrip but unfortunately only they couldn’t get you any down any closer than a hundred feet off, oh what’s that thirty three metres or something off the ground. They couldn’t get you down on the deck but that’s the closest they get ya and most of the time that’s all you needed. You could come down through the last little bit and you can see the runway and you land

but there’s one time in Korea on the way over, airstrip called Yongdongpo . You’ll probably come across that in a lot or Seoul City, what it was. Bombed to hell that stage. Lined up on the airstrip and then they, “Right, sign over to you. It’s all yours,” and I was flying as second pilot at this stage. That’s another story I’ve got to come into. Flying second pilot. Straining our eyes through the

windscreen to try and see something. All you can see is fog. Next thing there’s telegraph poles in front of us. We were too far to one side of the strip. Yeah. Within that much of slashing against telegraph poles. Not very good for an aircraft to do that. So had to pull up and go around and go back. Go out somewhere, be re-identified and brought back again for another go at it. That’s one of the scariest

things happened to me. The other one was we were takin’ off. We had a load of oxygen cylinders to take over to Kup’o where they put it in the Mustang fighters where we charged their oxygen systems and that’s about all. Mostly oxygen cylinders. Bit of mail, bit of other general freight and we’re taking off at Iwakuni, across Japan itself. Over the Japan Sea and

my motor conked out. We’re fully loaded. Full of fuel and freight and everything else, fully loaded. We started to lose height. So the skipper, who was also the CO [Commanding Officer] of the squadron, by this time I’m also sitting in the second pilot’s seat this time. Turned around, head back. We had to cross a mountain range in Japan. Actually we’re losing that much height we actually flew through it, down the valleys.

Come back to Iwakuni. Now Iwakuni’s built on the edge of the Inland Sea, so you actually come over the Inland Sea to land and there was a sea wall around the edge of the run way and everything else. Well during that bit across the Japan the navigator had been down the back tossing out these oxygen cylinders, which we weren’t supposed to do but, you know, emergency situation you had to do and we were getting down losing height. We were coming over the Inland Sea and here’s this sea wall

basically in front of us. Not below us but in front of us. One engine gone and the skipper calls for ‘close gills’. Well the gills, I’ve got a photograph of that later I’ll show you, they’re around the engine. They affect the cooling and you’ve got to keep an engine hot, cause internal combustion engine is actually just a hot gas engine full stop. That’s the bottom line. It’s just a hot gas engine and they got to keep it hot

otherwise it can lose power or stop altogether. They called for ‘close gills’ and I reached up to close the gills, it was on the right hand side of the cockpit, and I looked at the air temperature of the good engine and it was right over past the heat range. It was just about to conk out as well. I said, “Close?” He [said,] “I said, ‘Close gills,’ look at that!” and he’s, “Close the effin’ gills.” “All right.” So I closed the gills and we just had to get

over that sea wall and land to be met by ambulance, fire engines and a bulldozer. The bulldozer was to push you off the strip if you crashed. To get rid of, clear the strip ready for the next one. That was common. You got used to the sight of that bulldozer after a while but at first it was a bit scary. It’s just like driving out here now on a winter road and seeing a bulldozer there ready to push the wrecks of cars off the road. You think,

“What’s going on here?” Yeah. Oh there was a third one. What the hell was that one? Oh

Are we on?

Oh we’re going.

All right.

First got into Japan on a civilian flight. It had an engine problem at Manila on the way. Had to have a night’s stop at Manila. Got into Japan and it was just after, it was in May

’51. Just after Japan had sort of got back some of its autonomy and there was a big official looking Japanese comes on board and checking papers and everything else. Then we unloaded and same old thing. Clear in, get all those forms signed in. Assigned a room. Had a, cause now I was a sergeant in the sergeants’ mess, had a room by yourself

and next day report to the commanding officer and everything else ready for duty and down to the crew room and see what’s going on. I think I didn’t fly that day I don’t think. The next day you got, “Okay, got to be ready to take off at dawn,” or pre dawn it was, “and be down here with your log book, flying gear and everything else,” and this is summer time over

there. So didn’t worry too much about flying clothing, no warm stuff, and I was scared. I didn’t know what the hell was out the other end. I knew I was going to Korea, but what the hell was over there? I got no idea. I was really scared. First time up. First time to face the enemy you know. Anyway it was quite an uneventful trip really.

Oh I didn’t know whether we were gonna run into any anti-aircraft fire or enemy fighters. Bad weather didn’t enter

my head and that was the worst enemy of the lot and no, that was all going through my head and I wasn’t particularly happy at all. Then we got over there and unloaded and then the commanding officer, the British air transport section, they just do all the handling. We just did the carrying. They did the freight and whatever, whether it was people or freight to go one way in or out on Yongdongpo and he’s talking to my skipper, who’s the CO of the

squadron. He’s tellin’ us about the snipers that had been busy. So that didn’t make me happy either. In the end…

Snipers? Killing people. Killing our people. You didn’t know when it was gonna hit you. Anyway that was loaded up again and took off. Come back and I thought, “Well a bit of an anticlimax there. Nothing happened so what’s the…?” but you just didn’t know. The next

time, that was it. Next time. Could be this time, next time.

Well the commanding officer or squadron, squadron leader then, squadron leader Murdoch, he was a good fellow. Navigator I went over with, Mark Fitzgerald and the second pilot at that time was Clive, I can’t remember his surname. We flew probably about a month together like that

and then Clive finished his tour of duty and went back to Australia. So we’re one member of one crew short. Well the worst thing you could do is have one crew short, cause there’s one aircraft short. So the skipper said to me, “Come up here, Snow,” they called me ‘Snow’ then, “and see if you can help out this, take the place of the second pilot.” So he showed me what levers to push and pull, what buttons and things to do. So my job then for the next

eight months was to work the radio before takeoff and once you were on course get into the second pilot’s seat. Well actually, no before that, radio to start the takeoff run but before the takeoff run I’d have to get in the pilot’s seat, give him the flap, the call for flap, “Flap lever,” get ready with the undercarriage lever. Set the gills and then when we were airborne and

safely airborne, maybe not even on its course yet but safely airborne, wheels up. I go back into the radio seat and give the radio message about airborne time. Well they always checked the airborne time off, on course at a certain time, heading for height. We always had a specified height to fly at and course and that was it. I stayed there until that was over then get back on the radio

and sometimes get back on the second pilot’s seat if we hit rough weather or something happens and then approaching the landing I’d be on the radio getting all the landing instructions. “Runway 24, windows 08 or whatever.” All those things and where to go, what taxi way to take once landed and then get back in the second pilot’s seat for the landing. Select the wheels down, flap, gills open or shut,

keep an eye on instruments and when we land I’d stay there till we got back to our dispersal point and then I’d have to get out and supervise the unloading cause that was another job the signallers had to do. We had to do a course for that, which I’ve got photograph here. They’re called air portability and that was conducted by the School of Land Air Warfare at Williamtown. So I’d have to go back and supervise the unloading and then the loading cause the loading in particular for transport

aircraft is not like loading a truck or a car. You have to balance it both ways, sideways, front, rear. Also it has to secured against any movement. Not just like a car going over a bump but you might drop two or three thousand feet in one hit or raise that much in a storm. You don’t want the load going through the side of the aircraft or something so it has to be secured. That was my job too.

Yeah.

For most of the time in Korea, but no recognition for it. No official recognition.

Well it was upsetting in a way, yes. They could’ve put it in my log book or something like that but I tell people they can say, “Oh it’s all bull,” but it’s not, it’s fair dinkum cause I know other people have done it. Even a nursing sister did it on one trip, put the wheels down and flaps up and down and that sort of thing but there’s more to it than just that, and a couple a times I

was even flying the aircraft. That was the when that skipper was relieved and the new skipper came on he said to me one of the first trip out he said, “Well I could get a bullet up the backside and you’ll have to take over, so you might as well learn how to fly the thing.” So he put me up there. Instead of going back to radio all the time I’d be flying for a bit.

Oh be in the air any time between

two to six hours. Any time in that range. Depending on where we were going and what the weather was like.

Nearly every day a week. Sometimes twice a day, depends on the weather. Weather was the biggest factor cause there’s always needed, always wanted, but if the weather was too bad, like a cyclone coming in, well, we just couldn’t fly.

Not much. Not

much at all. I learnt more about it long after I was home out of the air force cause you only know what’s going on in your little area, your little section. The only way you know that there’s something happening, a big push or something, a big stoush going on is we go over for a medivac, we come back fully loaded with wounded. Other times you only come back with one or two or something like that. So

Medivac? Oh they were

all right. I think some of the worst ones was when the troops were coming back on recreation oh some of them were a bit silly, particularly the Maoris. Half drunk and all that sort a thing. I think on one occasion there was, not my flight but another flight, the Maoris were that uproariously rowdy and everything else that they thought they were landed in Japan. They actually landed at Pusan and unloaded and the skipper said, “I’ll pick ’em up when they’re sober,”

and handed them over to the military police. Yeah, that’s the that sort a thing did happen. It’s been recorded but not to my flight. I know some of ’em were rowdy and the funniest thing, funny to me now, funny at the time too, was we picked up half a dozen pilots from 77 Squadron, fighter pilots to bring them back to Japan for R&R [Rest and Recreation] and we were climbing up out of Yongdongpo and you had to climb up through holes in the cloud virtually cause that much air

traffic going on, little helicopters whizzing in with wounded and all sorts of things. Climbing up through a hole in the cloud and one of the pilots from 77 Squadron, he opened the cabin door, rushed in and said, “Hey you fellas, you’re going over the front line.” We said, “Yeah. So? So what?” He couldn’t understand it. I said, “You’ve gotta get over the front line to get a hole to climb up through the cloud. Nowhere else to go.” If you go in the cloud you could

head on collision with other aircraft cause we didn’t have any radar and half the other craft didn’t have radar. The only people that had radar was the ground controlled approach people and there was just the one mish mash until they identified one particular aircraft by sitting on a particular course for a certain time and then bring you in to land.

Yeah. You might get hit if you’re over the territory but if you get hit with another aircraft, well that’s it.

You have to get hit once and that’s the end of both of you. Both you and the other aircraft and everybody in ’em.

Yeah.

Well it didn’t happen an awful lot to me when I was flying but it happened once. Knocked out the starboard engine. Left a hole in the fuselage down just below my

seat. That’s about all I know of it but some of the other crews, when they, evacuation Hamhung, they reckoned they could hear the ground fire as they were taking off and being shot at and that low cause the enemy was only just over the end of the airstrip at that stage.

Well yeah, down time. I got back to my

model aeroplane making. I got I was making an aeroplane. It’d never fly, just a static thing but I used to spend a lot of time doing that and because I didn’t drink. I mean I might drink a bottle a wine a year, that’s about all but I couldn’t be called a drinker by any shape or form.

Well a couple a things. I know my father never drank at home. Although I know he had a drink here and then, you could

smell it on him, but then I could see what some a the other fellas were doing to themselves. They were spending all their money on drink and getting drunk and doing stupid things. I mean you’ve probably heard the story about yourself about, “Oooh, I had a great time last night. Oooh, I was sick,” and I thought, “Being sick, you call that a great time?” Yeah they did, some of ’em. I thought, “They’re nuts,” but then didn’t make

too many friends because I wouldn’t drink with ’em. I don’t know where they get this idea of how drinking with someone is such a bonding thing. I could drink lemonade or water or tea or coffee or anything else but no, you had to drink beer. “Gotta be a man.” All this business and some people I knew they must a gone home with a huge debt and I thought, “No.” I wasn’t worried about getting killed or anything after the first week, you got used to it.

I thought, “No, I’m going home,” and I started to send money home to buy a block a land. So I saved my money and the quickest way to go through money in any situation like that is to start to drink. Yeah.

In the mess.

In the mess, the sergeants’ mess. The thing, well we did get leave. We had seven days leave after about every seven, eight weeks.

They rotate it because we were flying that much and some of the blokes’d go on a trip to Tokyo or Kure, somewhere and they come back stony broke again and I thought, “Yeah, well you can see those places but no, I’ll save my money.” So by the time I got home I had enough money I owned a block a land. I bought enough an old secondhand car and

some new civilian clothes.

Oh yeah. Oh call me all sorts a names, yeah. Mm. That didn’t worry me. That could go over my head.

Oh not very nice names. Yeah.

Japanese women? Oh yeah well just down the road. You

could walk down, I did walk down a few times to Iwakuni town itself. Oh there was plenty of women around. Plenty of prostitutes, if you want one a them. I wasn’t interested there either. Again, what’s the point? Chance of diseases and spending money. Yeah it might sound like I was worshipping money but I wasn’t, I was just saving it. Not spending it but you get to know the sort of people they are and the

sergeants’ mess and I think the officers’ mess also, they had house girls and the sergeants’ mess one girl would look after two sergeants and they’d do your washing and do your cleaning and whatever for so much a week. I’ve forgotten now how much we paid them a week but for them it was good money and for us it was cheap labour and a chance too because sometimes we’d get back in late afternoon. You’re really had

it, fagged out and just want to have a shower, have a snooze cause you’ve been up since dawn or before dawn. You have to be airborne by first light and but they’d be knocked off and gone home by then but you’d come in or they’d come in early morning, I don’t know what time they really started at in the morning when you woke up your clothes’d be there ready on the chair. New uniform you know all cleaned and pressed

and ever whatever was in the pocket was in those pockets. If there’s money in this pocket that was in that pocket. They were very honest that way and…

Oh I tried to. You learn a few words and that. Yeah, oh some of ’em for a few extra dollars they’d get into bed with you in the morning, but I thought, “No, I’ll save my money.” That’s caused a few other names too. Called me ‘shy’ and things but I couldn’t see the point. Oh this, “Eat, drink and

be merry cause tomorrow we die,” business. I said, “No, I’m goin’ home.” I was sure I was going home cause three times I didn’t, I almost didn’t, make it. I think I told you two and the third one, I could hardly believe it. The skipper I was flying with was Flight Sergeant Murtaugh, Leon Murtaugh, and I don’t know whether he’s been interviewed or not but he died just before Christmas and he held the record for the number of missions back and forth between Japan and Korea.

We’d been to Korea, we’re coming back and got on one of these stacks and we get up the top. You work your way down as different aircraft land but when our time finally came we were running on empty. We ran out of fuel on the landing run.

We had to be towed off the airfield, had to be towed off the airstrip out of fuel. If it had a been another few seconds later we would a been in the Inland Sea. Another time, almost as life threatening but actually turned out all right, was flying from Japan to Korea.

Daylight, good weather, good visibility and Flight Lieutenant Daniels I think was the skipper at that time cause I was odd bod. I seemed to fly with a lot of different crew, same as I done a lot of different jobs, and we were out over the Japan Sea again and suddenly the aircraft starts to take a what seemed like evasive action. All this sort a thing. Hard left, hard right, dive and

I said something to the skipper. He said, “That’s not me.” I thought, “Uh oh, what the hell’s causing this? We’re outa control,” cause we hadn’t heard anything. Like no enemy fire hitting the aircraft or couldn’t smell anything burning. Couldn’t see anything. “What the hell is it?” Anyway after what seemed like hours but probably only about five minutes the skipper said, “Prepare to abandon.”

Well we the skipper, we all did actually in those days I think, wore the chest type parachute and when on board the aircraft we stowed them in little stowage positions. So I started to send down a message, a mayday [total distress] message, and got out my parachute, hooked it on, turned round, opened the cabin door. Oh no. We had two army, air force,

two army officers in there as passengers, which I’d forgotten about cause there you don’t take much notice of what your load is. You just walk through it up to the cabin and away you go. We had two army officers, Australian army officers. So I went back to the skipper. I said, “We’ve got two army officers back there. Got any spare parachutes?” We didn’t carry spare parachutes. So what he said wasn’t nice. So he said, “Well, only one thing to do. We gotta go down with it.

Somehow.” So I unhooked my parachute, put it back in the storage. Sent out another message which was a, “Pan pan pan,” which means you’re in trouble but you needed help, and then put up with that for about another five minutes, it seemed like hours again, and then suddenly everything’s fine, great. We’re just going along beautiful. So landed at Pusan, or Pusahn as they

call it, and both the skipper and I got out of the aircraft, walked around tryna find, “What the heck’s gone wrong with this thing?” and we walked around the tail and on the elevators and the rudder, although it’s an all-metal aircraft supposedly the controlled surfaces on those Dakotas is fabric covered. The old spit and string. Fabric covered on the, not the whole lot, but just on the control surface

and the rudder and when they cover it with fabric they cover down, it comes down to a trailing edge, very thin. They put a piece over that about four inches wide, with a serrated edge on both sides, stuck on to hold the trailing edge together and on one side this piece has gone. So what it must have been is as it started to peel off it was affecting the control of the aircraft to such an extent, particularly when it got fairly long,

we were completely out of control. Didn’t know what the heck was going on. The engines were operating all right and you couldn’t hear or see anything or smell anything and then when it peeled right off we were okay again.

From memory it was something like, “Oh shit.”

Mm. We were still over the sea but from memory it wasn’t at winter time because winter time if we went down at sea we had three minutes to survive before being pulled out. If we didn’t get pulled out in three minutes by a ship or something we’d freeze to death. If there’s pancake ice in the sea that’s cold. Pancake ice in the sea. Yeah but when it

we regained control again I thought, “Oh that’s great, but what caused it?” You know it was going through our minds. “What the hell was it?” Yeah, it doesn’t take much to bring an aeroplane down. Just one bullet in the right place’ll do it too.

Not with our squadron but in 77, yeah. A couple of blokes we went through the early training with at Point Cook and one bloke in particular

was Smith, they called him Smith. Cady Smith, Ken Smith he was. He was a like a man’s man, a lady’s man, a woman’s man, a mother’s boy. Fantastic bloke and he went there flying Mustangs and when they converted Meteors they ran into some bad weather from going from Iwakuni across to Korea and I’m not sure how it

worked, how it was, but anyway he had to bail out and either he pulled his rip cord too soon or something happened and the parachute was burnt off him as he bailed out. They recovered his body later on out of the sea but a few others were shot down but what annoyed me mainly about that supposed situation was that, I said earlier about station standing orders, daily routine orders and other orders

and when you look at these other orders there was a ‘killed and wounded’, ‘missing’ and ‘postings in and out’, that sort a thing, and read down there number of when there’s officers or some of them sergeants, pilots, were killed some if they were sergeants they were posthumously promoted to pilot officer and stuck off rations strength same day. That really got me. Struck off ration strength same day,

which means they’re dead, you don’t have to buy, don’t have to draw rations for them. I thought, “You heartless buggers. You could do that without making it so obvious.” Struck off ration strength same day. Yeah. Oh there was some fun times there. I don’t know who it was now, some commanding officer of some unit was getting married in Tokyo. So being in the all the COs

of the units around the place were invited to the wedding and being in a commanding officer’s crew we went to Tokyo. No cost at all. Yeah, landed at Haneda Airport and spent the night in Tokyo. I didn’t do much but my navigator mate he went all he wanted to go was go to find a bar and drink. That’s what gets me about drinking you know. We both walked out. We were the only two sergeants, cause I was

second pilot again that trip. The skipper went off to the wedding and here we are, two sergeants walking around Tokyo for the first time in our lives and he finds a bar. That’s all he wanted. Didn’t worry about what Tokyo looked like at in then cause it’s all changed now but I wandered around Tokyo all day. Then I got a taxi to the back to the barracks where we were staying the night and next morning I got another taxi from there back to Haneda Airport in time to join the rest

of the crew for take off back to Iwakuni. We were flying up along Japan you know, flying past Mount Fuji. “That’s Mount Fuji.” “Oh.”

Well Tokyo at that time, a lot of bomb damage still from the Second World War but it was a bit like a rundown old country town. About the only thing of any significance really was the American PX

store, that’s the post exchange they call it, so they called it PX for short and the money we had was British Commonwealth Occupation Forces script. Well you could change that into Japanese yen but you weren’t supposed to have American dollars or Australian pounds but of course you get around those things. So we had a few American dollars and went into this, although you’re supposed to have American

scripts. We didn’t have any American script. Went into the PX and I bought a camera in there. The first camera I had over there and started taking a few photographs then but you could buy almost anything in that place, in that post exchange. Stuff you couldn’t even buy in Australia when it was like still short supply but you know buildings weren’t all that tall and they weren’t all that modern. They were quite ancient and or

what I saw of them anyway.

Resemblance? Oh a lot a women were wearing their traditional dress. Heck of a lot. A lot of men too wearing their traditional dress walkin’ around the streets but where the men wore Western clothing it seemed as though they were wearing their younger brother’s or something like that. Just seemed it didn’t seem to fit properly and a lot of the women

were wearing Western dress but they looked, say, ordinary, average, except no reflection on you but all brunettes. Everywhere you looked there was brown eyes and brunettes. Well you haven’t got brown eyes. Yeah, oh well my eldest daughter’s blue-eyed brunette and yeah. The same as the Koreans. They were all brown-eyed brunettes and that reminds me that at one stage there this American concert

party came to Iwakuni and went down to the cinema watch this concert party and the thing was there after dark or after stand down time, 6 o’clock, we could walk around, Australians, walk around without hats or caps or any head gear on but the Iwakuni air base was shared by the Australians, the Americans and the British, mostly Americans. So you’re

walking down the road without caps or hats on, going to the cinema and there were the American MPs [Military Police] “What are you doing? Oh” coming up to take your name and rank and everything else about where’s going out without a cap and they come up close and they see the Australian flash. “Bloody Aussies.” They used other words besides that. You didn’t have to wear hats. So I get down the cinema on this particular time, went to cause the one and only concert party I saw there, and a girl came on stage. She’d

be probably about your height and build. Blonde tresses down to her shoulders, dressed in a cowboy outfit, a little short skirt and everything. She walked up to the microphone and she said, “Hello boys” and the whole place roared. She said, “What would you like me to do? Sing, dance?” and a voice from way up the back yells out, “Just stand there honey.” First blonde we’d seen for years you know.

Well some of ’em anyway. First blonde I’d seen for about six months and then they put on an act. There was men and women in the thing. Put on a good act. It was quite enjoyable. That’s the only one I ever saw and when we went to into main ports of call were Pusan, which was one hell of a airfield cause as you come into

Pusan from the sea it’s right on the southern, south eastern area of Korea. You come in to land on a strip. Not so bad but you could see it’s built like on a in a river, in a valley and each side and then you had you could see the mountains. One in front of you, one each side and there’s two rivers coming down, which join together further down, and the winds were terrific. Cross winds, head winds, you never know what’s there.

The wind’d change half way down the landing run and sometimes you’re hanging onto the darn wheel that hard to keep into wind or the other way till you get and then ready to switch back the other way as the wind changed direction before you hit that mountain. Coming back the other way wasn’t too bad. You come back and run off into the sea and take off. And the other one was the Yongdongpo or Seoul airstrip.

That was the busiest place I’ve ever seen in my life, both on the ground and in the air. When we landed there I’ve seen as many as twenty three aircraft in the circuit. Not up there but in a circuit. All going round chasin’ each other’s tail, (UNCLEAR) tail. Landing.

Well a thing that happened a lot of the times in any trip basically, you didn’t know what was coming. This could be the day. Anything happening. Taking off from Iwakuni in the winter time, then coming back from Korea in the winter time you’d probably have to sweep the snow off the wings and then when they sweep the snow of the wings it leaves

little spicules of ice sticking up, which interrupted the air flow over the wings, which didn’t give it enough lift. So there were times when you, particularly when you’re fully loaded, sat down the end of the run way and you go through a three a pre flight check of engine revs. You’ve got two magnetos on each engine and two sets of spark plugs. Two complete separate different ignition systems and you check each one to see what the rev drop is and you go back to

one, go back to two. The switches are up above the windscreen and you sit there. The brakes hard on, full flap. Bring your revs up. I think it’s about twenty eight fifty, something like that. “Permission to take off.” Right, get permission to take off. Full revs, then brakes are off. Go for it but with that ice on the wings still

you just didn’t know whether you’re gonna get off at the end and that’s the sort a thing. You just don’t know what’s gonna happen. It’s just like if you’re going to run across open area somewhere. You know there’s people out there trying snipe at you or open up on you or something. May not be, you just don’t know. Might be land mines. You don’t know. So whether we get off at the end of the strip we don’t know, but you’re gotta go.

Your turn. You’re gotta go, yeah and the few times you’re going down and you start to feel getting some lift because you feel the undercarriage moving and my hand was on that under-cart lever and as soon as you feel airborne, up with the wheels because you will leave. You might float a little bit but then you slowly climb

and you’re airborne. Then you can relax a bit.

Nobody, I don’t think. Well to my knowledge nobody ever showed any signs of being afraid, no. You just got on with the job. I don’t know what I looked like the first week I was there but I can tell you I was afraid and then the last week, last week I was once I knew I was due to come home. Oh boy, yeah I had about another six trips to do and that was really scary.

Would I survive those next but when we landed in sometimes we landed at Kimpo, was at the Mustang air base and then the when they changed over to Meteors and then Flying Sabres. That’s mainly what operated when I was there. Sometimes we’d land discharge engines or freight or something. That’s the first time I drove a jeep on the ice. Got out and drove a jeep down the middle of the runways

with snow on them. That was fun and games. Like being in the dodgem cars at the side show, all over the place, and then on to Yongdongpo , or Seoul airstrip. When we got there we were attaching to the British air transport detachment area and unloading and loading, whether it was freight or goods, or wounded or whatever or R&R or new troops coming in. Whatever the load we had on or taking back.

Sometimes we’d take freight in and when we get back to the aircraft ready to take off it’d be full of wounded or stretcher cases or that sort a thing. That was done while we were having lunch and we’d usually have lunch at the British transport office, which was usually bully beef and biscuits. I got to hate bully beef, although I can eat it now. But on one trip, I remember one trip it was before Flight or Squadron Leader Murdoch went back home

we landed there, taxied to dispersal and unloading was going on and the British soldiers were looking after the unloading and that and he said, “You two blokes hungry?” to my the navigator and myself. We said, “Yeah.” “Right. Bugger this stuff. Bully bloody beef. Let’s go to the American club at the, officers’ club.” They’ve got a curious system there, the officers pay for their meals.

So we go to the officers’ club. Fair walk but we find it and get there and the skipper’s wearing his flying suit with his rank showing, squadron leader. We’re both, navigator and myself we’re fly we’re in flying suits but no rank showing. So we just walk in and somebody in the door flings us a salute as we walk in and shows us a table. We sat down. We had a menu. Ordered a menu and everything else. I mean this is not far from the frontline all this stuff going on

and have a good meal. I can’t remember what it was but both we all had a good meal. You know gorged on this good food and then it comes round to sign for it. So I don’t know what the skipper signed but we both signed somebody’s name, somebody’s rank and that was it.

Well, call it an airport, airport today but it was an airstrip. Very busy place. Long run way. Next

to the river, which was normally ice about two feet thick in winter time on the river, and basically when we landed so the British had a transport office on one side. Further up was the American then further up again was the American evacuation and you’d see these little, did you ever watch that ‘MASH’ thing on TV? Had little helicopters coming in? Yeah, they were always

coming in and going out. Always. Like mosquitoes. We called ’em mosquitoes. Bringing in the wounded and going back empty and that’s one thing you had to dodge on your landing run, these darn things coming in and going out and at one point there the Red Cross had a huge marquee. Oh, this is probably about quarter of a mile off the actual airstrip, back with all these buildings and workshop areas and administration, whatever goes on back there cause I never got very far away from air

strips all the time I was flying but the Red Cross had this thing and you joined the queue and there’d be American soldiers, American marines, Australian army, British army. When any other of the United Nations that happened to be in that area at the time joined the queue and as you went in the door you were handed a paper mug and there’s crayons down, little short crayons down on the thing and you looked at this

cardboardy type mug and it had little squares all around the base of it. Black, milk no sugar, milk and sugar or weak or strong. Things like that. Little squares on. So you put a cross on a square what you wanted and you put the crayon down. You moved down the queue and there was one Red Cross, all women, would take the mug, check it and then whatever it was they handed it into another one the

right way round saying “Milk, sugar.” So this one’d carry out the order. They’re moving down slowly down the queue. There’s a great pile of doughnuts and you take a doughnut. You go further, there’s a great pile of cigarettes. Well I used to smoke then. Fill up your pockets with cigarettes and book matches, stacks a book matches, then you’re out the door at the other end.

The first time? I think I answered that one before. That was I was scared stiff, yeah.

No, not in detail. I mean you knew there was a war going on. I knew there was army, navy and air force all doing something over there but exactly what I didn’t know. I didn’t know where, I knew the place we were going to, Yongdongpo, or Seoul. I knew what we were taking, we were taking a load of freight over I think

that first time. What time we were leaving, early in the morning, so we had to get up about 3 o’clock and have breakfast and then get down to the flight hut and change into your flying gear and get out to the aircraft and be airborne by first light. So I knew what I had to do, my job. That’s about it. It was all adventure. All new coming up. Frightened of the unknown. Like walking through a dark place for the first time in your life and you didn’t know what was around the corner or over the hill. Bit apprehensive.

All we really knew what was if there was a stoush on there’d be more casualties or they’d want more rocket heads for the Mustangs. We were flying rocket heads over, which they’d fill with napalm and use.

I wasn’t in the evacuation of Hamhung. That was another story. So I wasn’t in that but generally speaking, you didn’t know much that was going on except like the side issues. The casualties and the requirements and although I remember one time coming in to land Yongdongpo we’re flying over one area and

I was looking down on, my habit when everything was going all right on a landing run to stand up and have a look out the windows before sitting back down in the seat to work all the controls. I was looking out and I could see this like the top of a hill, the whole thing of I don’t know how just lift up and years later I was talking to an army officer about it he said, “Oh yeah that was that must a been when the artillery duel was on at The Hook.”

Little area they nicknamed The Hook. I could see that from the air. Huge bombardment. There was big artillery duels there but we didn’t hear that.

Yeah, Korean labourers unloading the aircraft. That’s all. No women.

They just like looked like Japanese to me. They just went about their work. They didn’t seem to worry much.

We didn’t worry them.

Well they, well I it must be the Oriental psyche I suppose. It’s a bit like I’ve read about some of the Irish. If you two Irish men can have a great fight, they have each other, but as soon as one wins they’re great mates and I think that’s about what it was. The Japanese were defeated and they realised when the Emperor

cast, broadcast the message that ‘Japan is surrendering’. They’d been defeated and all the rest of it. They just accepted that fact. “Okay, the war’s over. We lost, so let’s get on with life,” and what they did and actually there was, by that time there was Korean guards carrying rifles and bayonets on the perimeter of Iwakuni airstrip.

Very modern airstrip

really. It used to be a flying boat base as well as a land plane base for the Japanese and when it was taken over the Americans had flying boats operating out of there as well as land planes and quite a large base and most of the it was a permanent type base. Most of the accommodation was all like permanent type buildings, as far as you can get permanent type buildings in Japan cause they have earthquakes all over there and most of them are built with the idea that they could be shaken to bits and

there’s a swimming pool there. I think it was only used by the officers. A cinema. Big parade ground. There’s a couple of photographs I’ve got there of parts of it and but quite a large airstrip. You could bit like a modern airport in some ways.

Only, oh in the mess itself, the sergeants’

mess there’s also a lot of Japanese girls acting as waitresses and so I’ve already mentioned the room girls we had looking after us that way. Well the mess girls they, well we had menus. One thing about the airmen’s mess you’ve got to give it or take. Either have that or go hungry sort of thing, but as you get promoted you start to have a bit of a menu. So

usually my main my main meal was at night. I did very little night flying in that area and you go into the mess. I used to go in early before the drunks got in there and they had these menus, it might be say baked lamb and vegetables for instance. There’d be a number alongside it and the first time I went in there I spoke to the

girl in English, said, “I’ll have the baked ham and vegetables thanks.” Looked at me and another chap came in behind me said, “Oh you’ve got a tell them the number.” So you learned to speak Japanese number. Like, “Ichi, I’ll have ichi,” or, “Shee, I’ll take shee.” Ichi, ni, san, shee, go. Number one to five. That’s about it. One to five. Ichi, ni, san, shee, go. So they take the number and away’d come

back your meal and the funny thing too that, I’m not sure how many there were there but probably about ten, something like that in the dining room and they all looked after one table each and when you wanted the soup or the main meal or if there was any pudding or something afterwards they’d take your plate away and bring the other one back. That’s like about the air force. I don’t think the army had that and another thing is they moved around one

every day. The girl that was on that table’s now on this one, next tomorrow she’d be on that one. So they kept rotating and oh some of ’em didn’t look too bad. After a while anything looks good and had one there, Mickey. I don’t know what her real name was, called her ‘Mickey’. I, I’d see her, she’s, when I woke up they were rotating. I started to change the table I ate at so that I got Mickey all the time.

Not as much as I probably would have been if I’d been in Australia I think.

Up to that stage, no.

No, not at all.

No, not in Japanese. To make matters worse I know several people when I told ’em I was going, I was on home leave before I went they’d say, “Oh don’t bring back a

Japanese bride.” Oh I got sick and tired of hearing that. “Don’t bring back a Japanese bride,” but no, I never saw anything that I could be interested in really.

Not an awful lot really. As I say, at when I went to high school that was a right mess up and the only well my actually my father tried to teach me once and he didn’t know much. Then my stepfather, and he knew even

less. It’s amazing but true and so when I was in my late teens, I think it was before I joined the air force, I sent away for a book Sex, Marriage and Intercourse I think it was called, something like that, but even then some of the descriptions and explanations and things, unless ya do a bit of practical work you don’t just understand it. So I still wasn’t all that educated so to speak.

No, but I think I was scared off by the all the VD [venereal disease] films we used to see and all the lectures we used to have. That’s enough to scare anybody off. Yeah.

Ooh yeah. You get the first one when you’re in rookies and then the every year or so wherever you go. If you go to a new place and I was going to new places all the time. So I was getting these darned lectures and movies all the time

but even then enough to scare anybody off anything and I thought, “What’s the point in catching VD?” but some people have got that, “Oh eat drink and be merry,” business, “for tomorrow we die.” Well I said, “I’m not dying. I’m going home.” I was quite sure of that, I’d go home. So I was gonna go back home clean.

Pardon?

By that time?

Oh yeah. Yeah I’d done a bit a that. Not much else though. Very little else, matter of fact. Mm.

Oh well the navigator, he was just the opposite. On the way over in Manila he went off with a prostitute. You know being in Manila for the first

time in your life and probably the only time in your life, all he wanted was a bar and a broad but I don’t understand that attitude at all. Maybe I’m abnormal, I don’t know but oh with five children I can’t be.

Crewing up? I’ve got no idea really. No idea at all. Totally different to what you see in movies or read about in the Royal Air Force, or even

American air force. I flew with a lot a people, lot of different people. I was supposed to be in the commanding officer’s crew in Japan. 30 Transport Unit, which was later named 36 Squadron, but even then I flew with four or five other pilots. It’s all in my log book.

Summer or winter?

It was totally different summer and winter. As I say, in the summer time it’d fry your end off. In the winter it’d freeze it off. That’s about right too. So in summer time we had a winter, sorry a summer flying suit, which I just wore ordinary boots with a flying suit.

You’d have to draw out your helmet, parachute and we could have two pairs of gloves. Silk ones and leather ones went over the top of them but we didn’t need those in summer time and you go to the crew room, change into all that, pick up all our gear. This is after early breakfast, go down there and pick up log books. The navigator’d pick up his nav log. I’d pick up my

sig’s log and the skipper’d be in his office at the front and watching the clock and you’d look at the board and see where you’re going. What aircraft number you’re in. “Oh yeah, Pusan. Yongdongpo again. Right. Right, we’re off.” Everybody’d walk out to the aircraft parked out there and it’s all reloaded and probably the snow, oh this is summer time. You climb on board,

check everything. Start your engines. Warm up the engines. Start to taxi up the run way. Contact the tower for take off instructions. Get on the end of the airstrip and check your magnetos. Get engine temperatures, engine revs. Everything seem to be all right, everything’s working. All the controls are working. You got two fans going.

Elevators are coming up and down. “Rudder feels all right?” “Rudder feels all right.” “Yeah, righto.” Call the tower again. “Permission to take off.” So you’re already given the wind and direction to take off. Take off. Wheels up. Call again on course and on height. Then fly, depending on the weather, if it was fog you had to fly down to Fukuoka and then go across from there.

cause they had apparently radio ah radar surveillance in that area but nothing if you went straight across from Iwakuni but if it was good weather, they call VFR or Visual Flight Rules, and you fly straight across Iwakuni and then from the across the Japanese mainland, what is there of it, and then cross the Japan Sea and then you land at Pusan. Otherwise you had to go down to Fukuoka, which is about another half

hour trip altogether and if you’re landing at Fukuoka, ah landing at Pusan, you call up well you report your position half an hour out or something like that. You call up closer, landing instructions and the whatever the circuit is. A circuit can be left hand or right hand. Most of the times it was left hand. Any other landing instructions. You finally land. Taxi in to your dispersal area

and somebody’d come out to load or unload or whatever and I remember on one occasion I had two nurses on board. I didn’t know what nationality they were. I knew they were army nurses but found out later they were Swedish I think. They were trying ask me where the toilet was but I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. Then when everybody’s satisfied with the load you repeat all that again to take off from Pusan and

fly up one of these valleys away from the darn mountain in the middle at the end and head off for Yongdongpo . You had to report your position, various places like Tagum, report over Tagum, height. One thing I nearly always forgot to ask and always got in trouble for was the altimeter setting. So you had to set your altimeter to the air pressure at that point so you could read your height correctly and then when you get to Yongdongpo

you join a circuit and you approach you call up on approach coming in and usually there’s one air traffic controller for the main body when you’re flying generally and there’s another one for airports. So you change over from the main body one or the airport control tower, get your landing instructions from there. If it’s kind, fine weather you join the queue and there’s like twenty three aircraft flying round in the landing circuit, not one above each other but all

nose to tail. Very close behind each other. That’s what I counted one time, twenty three, and they’re landing and landing, land while they’re still running down the run way the next one’s landing, next one’s landing.

Yeah, there were a few accidents but mainly from mechanical problems. Like anything under cart wouldn’t come down, there’d be a belly landing or something like that.

Oh sometimes they’d write the aircraft

off. It’d catch fire. Burn out but

I don’t really know cause usually it’s all over there and you can see ambulance and everything going over and you gotta you get on with what you’re doing. Mm.

Oh yes, yeah but there’s other people trained and in position to do what has to be done so you don’t worry about it. It’s a bit like you drive down the road and there’s an accident there. There’s an ambulance there, there’s police there, you just keep going. There’s

the people they know what they’re doing, they’re looking after it, so keep going.

Oh usually a bit tired. Just glad to be another day over and that’s it. Looking forward to a good meal sometimes. Trouble was you nearly always got too late for lunch, it’s early for evening meal. So eating was a bit spasmodic.

Pretty regularly. Sometimes every day if there was a big stoush on. Sometimes twice a day for a big one. Other times every second or third day, depending on how bad they were, where they were going cause when you got back to Iwakuni they would then go by road to Kure, big military hospital in Kure.

I got no idea. No idea at all. Just like you hopping in an ambulance now after an accident and people are all bandaged up and everything else and you don’t know whether they’ve got a broken arm or just a bit of skin off or what.

We just see men on stretchers. Bandages here, there. Some of ’em more sick than wounded. So they’d be just no bandages but some of ’em’d be bandaged up. Some of ’em are

arm in a sling or some have a something around their neck or their head and there’s always a nursing sister there and she was looking after them so we had to look after the air plane. Fly the air plane.

Most of ’em were, yeah. Mm.

Oh well as you walk in they’re all there. Say, “G’day, how are ya?” and keep on walking up and go into the cabin.

No, we didn’t have any Koreans on board. They were all they were either Australians or New Zealanders mostly. Sometimes we’d have other people on board but mostly Australians and Kor.. and New Zealanders.

No, no. We had no time to talk to them. They had no time, well they probably wanted to talk but we had no time to talk. We’d you do your pre-flight

checks on the outside of the aircraft before you get in. Help in the aircraft. You walk down the aisle, or up the aisle cause it’s on a slope. Might say, “G’day,” to a couple of wounded as you go past or the sister might be busy with something or you might have a word with her. Open the door, get in the cabin, sit down in your seat and you got to start your pre-flight checks and get into it. You’ve got work to do. That was it. I mean

Oh at the beginning I thought you know, “Poor buggers. They probably got a bullet somewhere,” but, “or a bit of shrapnel or what,” but after a while you just didn’t take any notice of ’em any more. Got on with the job. You had a job to do. You got on with that and then when we landed and taxied into dispersal walked back through them again and said, “Right, you’re here,” and, “See ya later,” or somethin’ like that. You get out. The ambulance is already backing up to the doors

to unload them. You’ve got to walk into your crew room, change out a your flying gear into your uniform. By that time the ambulance is filled up or two or three of ’em and gone. It’s all over.

Did up a point. Yeah, it wasn’t that bad. I mean it could of been a lot better. Could a been a lot worse too. I mean if I didn’t want to save me money I could have had a whale of a time.

Not much. Not much at all. The smell was one of the things you had to get used to, cause they use human excrement on their growing in the gardens, everything. Whether it’s for themselves or for the population as a whole, the paddy fields are stretched out with this human excrement and you could smell it even before you landed. Got that horrible peculiar smell.

You could go to sleep if you like, put it that way, and when you wake up, “Oh we’re back over Japan, yeah.” Mm.

Once I think, yeah once. The time we went to Tokyo. We found what we could call a café in Australia and I didn’t understand much

so I pointed to one, they brought me something in a bowl with raw egg mixed up with it. I ate that. Didn’t taste too bad, but that was the only thing.

Generally speaking not too bad, as far as I was concerned anyway, or as far as I could see or understand but what the Yanks didn’t like was that if they got a pass, a leave pass to go down

sometimes there’d be a movie or picture on a theatre in a Iwakuni and you could go down there and you’d have to get a leave pass and you had to be back on the base at 2359 [hours], which is one minute before midnight, whereas the Americans had to be back to 11 o’clock. I can remember coming back one night, it was only about a quarter to twelve something like that, and walking up to the gate and I had my leave pass in my hand and there’s this American MP all ready to take my name and number and everything down,

which he did. “Should a been here. You’re late,” and so on and so on. I said, “Look I’ve got a leave pass here says twenty three fifty nine.” He wouldn’t take any notice of that. Very officious in that regard and next day the commanding officer must have got a call from the MP chief officer, whoever it was, this sergeant was late coming back from (UNCLEAR) and my CO give him gave him a rocket. He said, “He had a leave pass for twenty three fifty nine, not eleven hundred as you,” or, “twenty

two hundred like you so and so,” twenty three hundred, “twenty three hundred like you so and sos.” Very flavourable language but that was one thing. The other thing was cause after 6 o’clock we could take hats off and they couldn’t. They didn’t like that and on one other occasion I ran foul of the Americans [who] was our commanding officer, we weren’t a big unit. It was only a very small unit. Too small to be a squadron at first, 30 transport unit,

and then it became a squadron later, called a Squadron 36 squadron, but being a unit, the commanding officer was entitled to a vehicle and he had an old beat up utility and one morning we were supposed to fly. I got down, had breakfast as usual. I think the navigator, yeah he was all right. He got there. We get down to flight hut, crew room and everything else and,

“Where’s the skipper?” “Not down here yet.” “Oh crikey.” So it was quite a walk from where the crew room was up to the officers’ quarters. I didn’t know which room he was in. So I grabbed his utility, keys are always in it, drove up to the officers’ mess. Walked in the front door, all in my flying gear. Looking for name’s up and I found his room, number. Found his room. Walked in. Woke him up. I said, “Hey, we’re supposed to be flying this morning, skip.”

“Oh,” few choice words a language. So he quickly got into his uniform, back down into the utility and we virtually flew from the officers’ mess down to the flight hut and of course the American MP books the number down as exceeding the speed limit whilst on the unit. Only supposed to be about twenty mile an hour at the most. He must a been flat out down there and I get a rocket from that. I don’t know why but I got the rocket from that

but then the skipper said, “It wasn’t, it wasn’t Sergeant Webster driving that. It was me and you can take your so and so whatever and stick it wherever you,” gave him a talking to. Last I heard about that. Yeah.

No, I don’t think I’d be close friends with anyone actually while I was there. Friendly

yeah, but not close friends.

No, not close friends. Not close enough to well, pick the navigator. All he wanted to do was booze and broads and I wasn’t into either of those and that’s what he wanted to do. So I never went out with him that much to on leave or something. He went his way and I went my way on leave.

Very unusual. That’s why I’m peeved off I never got any recognition

for it.

Oh yeah, it was safe. Yeah. Safe all right.

At first, yeah it was but once I got used to the routine it became easy. Yeah. The worst part was I had to accept responsibility for other things. Like I had to know what the instruments were and to draw attention to the skipper if something was going wrong or

even in a be ready so as soon as he called for something I was already half way there, sort a thing. I knew what was coming up. I learned the routine, mm.

That part wasn’t too bad. The worst part I think was, if I’d been in the wireless operator’s seat with everything, there was three or four very hair raising experiences when I was in the second pilot’s seat I wouldn’t have known much about it and probably

wouldn’t a worried about it, but being up there in the front, and seeing it happening, experiencing it happening, now it’s a different story altogether. You just don’t know from second to second or half second to half second if we’re gonna make it. You know hanging on the edge of your seat was nothing compared with what that was. It’s just like they use it in

movies at times. They make a picture and there’s a car driving down the road and there’s a train coming in the middle of the crossing, whether he gets through in time’s, just makes it sort a thing. Well that’s the sort a situation it was and quite often sometimes taking off, especially with ice and snow. A lot a times landing with no fuel, one engine out. I had many landings one engine out. That was becoming almost routine, except that one particular one where

we were losing hardly had enough height to get over the sea wall. Nearly left our wheels hung up on the sea wall. Yeah.

Very spartan. I mean you’ve only probably only been inside a civilian aircraft. Well they’re padded. They’re insulated. They’ve got comfortable seats. Everything’s there but a military aircraft, they’re purpose built to do a job and

well the Dakotas, there was different marks of them, or models if you like. Some of the early ones they had a row of seats down the side, aluminium, with sort of an indentation in it and they’re supposed to carry cushions and that for you to sit on, in the indentations, but quite often there’s not enough cushions there. So the troops that came in and had to sit on that they’d be sitting on ice cold aluminium in ice cold weather. Not very comfortable

and when you get up airborne there’s virtually very limited, if any, heating in the cabin part and the main part. In the cockpit area there’s a bit of heating there in the winter time but you’re still, well for winter flying I would dress with two pairs of woollen socks and woollen underwear and then what we used to call ‘woolly bull’. It was made of kapok, had zippers down the arms

and down the legs like a boiler suit, overalls if you like, combination thing but zippers down the arms, down the legs. So you could put your flying boots or put your flying suit over the top of that and then put your boots on over the top of all that and then put silk gloves on, your leather gloves on over the top a that and then we had parkas, British army parkas, which we put on or would use when we got out of the aircraft over there or

but not actually while flying and they come up all over the top of all that and then they had a hood with a copper wire in it, so you could bend the wire so just that much of you was peeking out. The rest was all covered under a nice thick hood and the rear end of it came, although the front would end about half way to your knees the back came down below your knees. So that when you sat down you sat on that part instead of anything

freezing. They were very good. Well designed but

Yeah, very spartan. There’s no insulation. I mean when you, you sat down if later models if you had no, we didn’t have seats in any of ’em properly like the seats like what you call seats today. They were just forms down the side which could also fold up if I remember rightly so we could carry more freight

and it was just a wooden floor with areas where you could screw attachment bolts in there and the sides were just aluminium, same as the outside, same as inside. Nothing on it, except a bit a paint. That’s all. That was the most and then down the rear of the aircraft there’s only about that much, little door in that. You went through there and there

was a little toilet thing in there they called the ‘Elsan’ in there and you went in the main cockpit area. Soon as you went through the door navigator’s seat was on the left, little tiny table. Radio operator’s seat’s on the right with all your radio in front of ya. There was different for the Morse code transmission type radios. There was half a dozen sets and you they come in different frequencies.

You take one out of there and put it in the spare rack and put another one in and one part you had a control for the trailing aerial. You could run out a couple a hundred feet. Don’t forget to bring it in again before you land and that had a counter on it so you knew how much you had out and you had a little table. Enough, big enough, to put your log book on, the Morse key, microphone for the voice plus stowage for the parachute

and the navigator’s very similar set up with his requirements and he had a drift calculator. Look through, work out his drift and above him there was a spot where you could put in a Verey pistol [distress flare gun], hook it in. Fire Verey cartridges, signal cartridges out and then just in front of that a little cabin door between the navigator and the skipper, little tiny cabin door which you could

open when everything’s off and probably throw things in or out or use the storage for your parachutes. On the other side there was a storage area only about so wide but there was a lot of hydraulic pipes and thingies running in and out of that. I did put my parachute in there one time and one of the hydraulics broke and it got covered in hydraulic oil. So we not only didn’t have any brakes, I didn’t have any parachute either

but up above that, about the middle of that whole area was astrodome. So the navigator could shoot the stars and get his positions from that or you could stick your head up in there and have a look out sometimes and then just in front of that the two seats. Second pilot on the right and skipper on the left and then in front of all that’s there all the controls. So you had the controls on between the two of ya the throttles,

the mixtures and flying instruments in front of the skipper and also in the centre be some of the like directional gyro, artificial horizon then a oil compass up the top. Another large compass down below. Fuel selector switch. Auto pilot on or off switch. Over on the right

there was a gills controls and the radios controls for the voice radio and down on the left hand side for the co pilot was the two levers, one for the flaps and one for the wheels, and the thing was or the skipper was he had his seat, his controls, with both controls. He had on his left the radio controls so he could switch around, listen into what I was sending out or he could use the voice

radio independently. Then the windscreen. We had hydraulic windscreen wipers. Above that there was all the switches for the engines. The de-icing, I’m not sure where the de-icing was, de-icing boots and fire extinguisher buttons and feather buttons. Feather buttons when the you got a sick engine you got a stop the engine you turn the blades of the air screw in line with the airstrip and that’s feathered it.

How do you mean? Being sick or exhilarated?

That’s the ice cream

That’s the ice cream man.

Yeah.

Well I only got airsick actually

when I was based at Richmond and first flying cause it was summer time and one particular trip I was we were on air, what do they call it? Bushfire spotting, air patrol for bushfire spotting. Flying around looking for fresh outbreaks of bushfires. That’s low height and very rough weather cause all where the fires are in summer time there’s hot air coming up anyway and it’s very bumpy. I did, I got sick that time, yeah. About the only time

I’ve ever been airsick I think.

Oh, “Wow it’s all over. Great. Forgot it. Come home.” I was posted back to Richmond base and in no time I was posted to Amberley. To go on to Lincolns. Different set up altogether.

You mean general civilian population? Well I remember one thing. I was living at home with my mother and stepfather and, at Marrickville, and Marrickville Town Hall used to be the place to go on Saturday night for a dance. So I went up there one night all done up,

used to get dressed up those days, and I had my return of active service badge on my lapel and I was standing there looking around to see who I could ask for a dance and just a little bit over my left shoulder I could hear a group of young couples, boys and girls about my age, late teenagers or early twenties, something and then I realised they were talking about me and I heard someone say, “Oh it’s probably his father’s

badge he’s wearing,” cause the Korean War didn’t mean anything to them. Not a thing. That’s why one reason they still call it ‘the forgotten war’.

Yeah I do, and particularly my outfit, 30 Transport. You can read most of these books I got and most other books you can find there’s very little written in them except for 77 fighter Squadron.

You wouldn’t even realise we had a transport squadron there too.

Oh a bit downhearted you know. I was there. Yeah, but there’s no record in this book. Doesn’t even mention this, doesn’t even mention our unit. It’s like you go back with to work and you, “We’ve been to Brisbane.” “Oh what’s Brisbane? You haven’t been there.”

Nothing. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t count.

Oh a bit downhearted at the time, especially when kids were wearing my father’s return from active service badge. That was something I thought, “You idiots. You don’t know what’s going on,” and they didn’t. Most people didn’t have a clue. Never heard of a place called Korea. It’d probably be on the news now and again but there’s so much else on the news. There’s always a war going on

somewhere. Even today we’ve got troops overseas in about a dozen different places. Most people don’t know. Never heard of ’em.

Again, they were a purpose built aircraft. Actually a Mark IV Lancaster, which they renamed the Lincoln. Hot as hell in summer. Freezing in winter. Leaked like a sieve. Yeah you get wet sitting inside, yeah. They leaked like a

sieve and they looked like a big, well they used to call them a heavy bomber. Huge heavy bomber, World War II but they’re only five foot wide. That’s all and you can see in the book of the Lancaster, which it is, a Mark IV Lancaster, how narrow they are and they’re just a flying bomb bay.

Yeah, they’re very narrow. Five foot wide. Flying bomb bay. The bomb bay’s thirty foot long and they’re built to carry bombs. No creature comforts at all. Oh there is an Elsan a toilet down the back but when you get in the back door, there’s a little back door, you turn left to go onto a bit of a ramp. You’ve only got about that much room to crawl over into the rear

turret and when you get in there you sit down in the rear turret and you’ve got the two guns in front of you and the gunner’s table, with switches and controls there and you a little joy stick which turns the turret all over the place and the firing buttons and that. You’ve got your controls up on the right hand side for the gyro gun sight but you look down you can’t see anything or look over these things. There’s nothing. You look up and there’s nothing, just

sky. You look either side as far back as you can look and there’s nothing. You’re sitting right out on the end of the pencils almost as though someone’d give ’em and flick and you’d fall off. That’s what it feels like. You feel so exposed right out there on the tail. Then well to go forward you get in there and as soon as you turn in the door there’s a directional gyro

transmitting compass. Big thing, about that high, about that round sitting there. That’s the main compass of the aircraft but the repeater’s up to the pilots and then if you don’t look out you bump your head on the huge ammunition bin that’s got at least three and a half thousand of these things stuck in it. You got a duck around that, or duck under it, and then you got the astrodrome, which is I think about this

diameter and about that high to climb over. Used to be a, the early models there was a radar dome underneath and that was part of the control cover system. That’s there still. So you got to go around the ammunition bin, don’t knock the gyro compass, over this thing and then you’re up against the upper turret. That’s sitting there. You’ve got a squeeze around the sides of that because this is carrying about two hundred and ten

of these in canvas bags hanging on the side. You squeeze pass that and then you’ve got the main spar and when you look at a photograph you don’t realise that the main spar goes through the middle of the fuselage. So you had to climb over that to get into the front part of the aircraft. So as you get over nearly over that you’ve got the radio operator and the navigator and you got the

flight engineer sitting on the right hand side and the pilot on your left and then down below, underneath the flight engineer, the bomb aimer’s got a crawl down there into the nose. As I say, no creature comforts and hardly move, hardly enough room to move in the darn things. So you got a stow your parachute somewhere. The pilot usually sits on his in that

aircraft.

Well first of all there was the noise. If you ever saw that movie called Memphis Belle, that was actually that showed things in that movie I’ve never seen in any other movie. There was the vibration where that chap’s camera vibrated off his table. An almost mid air collision, which I experienced

a few times. Now there was a collision between enemy aircraft and another and that showed up, they’re only made of aluminium. That just chopped the tail off the other aircraft. That’s quite easily done and the noise, and the noise is what got me. It’s what made me deaf. The noise inside a Lincoln or Lancaster is terrific cause there’s no mufflers on those engines and you’ve got forty eight cylinders hammering out a noise. Yeah, four engines

twelve cylinders each. A huge amount a noise and it gets to the point where it can actually cause your ears to bleed. Although you’re wearing a helmet with, well it’s only ear pieces on. It’s not mufflers of any kind. An oxygen mask with a switch, microphone switch on the front of it and one curious thing happened to me in training with the Lincolns. I think I explained before how the

ammunition trays came down the sides and then down, up under to feed the guns and I was firing actually. I was doing firing practice and suddenly I’m starting getting dragged forward out of my belt. I had a seat belt on and I had to stop firing cause I got down my chin’s almost on the table. What had happened was that my cord, communication cords for my phones and the microphone got caught up in the ammunition belt

and was feeding it to the guns. It was going and I’m getting dragged forward and then I hear this ‘clonk’. I couldn’t move. I could talk. So I finished up, I called up the skipper and told him what happened and the I think it was the mid upper gunner, he came back and luckily he was carrying a wee were all issued with a folding pen knife. Pulled out his knife and cut the cord so I could get back but I couldn’t communicate after that. Yeah, those are the sort of things that happen on training runs.

When I first went to Malaya I was on the radio and we just had to go out and bomb various areas in Malaya, it was the Yuling jungle and the navigators and the pilots they did a fantastic job to find the targets cause quite often you found a point, reference to a map. It might be a river, a bend in the river or some other prominent feature where you could say,

“Right, we’ve got the point.” Now they’ve got to fly around, probably have to do a circuit even. Once you discovered it, come in over that at a correct compass bearing. Then your target was so much distance beyond that and you had your time, your speed your time. You work out how many seconds after you crossed that point. Release your bombs and then we’d come down, that was about five thousand feet, which is not very high, but there wasn’t much ground fire,

if any, and come down then and strafe but even at five thousand feet when you dropped the bombs you could feel them going off and you’re jumping in your seat as the concussion from the bombs going off that height and then we come down, strafe and there’s a good painting in one of these books about two Lincolns doing just that, they’re coming down a strafing run after bombing and both the tail, the mid upper and the nose guns they’d

all open up. You get the order to fire and cease fire and they go round again. If you’ve got any ammunition left, “Fire,” “Cease fire.” That was what mainly it was.

Kill the enemy and we were told that they were there in that particular area at that time and why we had to be so specific about the

area was that the British or the Australian army was usually just a bit further out than that waiting to come in afterwards and clean up and we often wondered whether we were actually hitting anybody but talking to one of the British army chaps later on back at base and he was saying that he didn’t know what we were using, but it must a been these fellas, because they’re going straight through the rubber trees and hitting the enemy soldiers, or the

terrorists as they called ’em. They were hiding behind it. They’re watching us go past strafing, probably just keeping an eye round the side of the tree. Well these go straight through. So we did some good that way. That was feedback from the troops that went in afterwards.

Ah that they were really terrorists, what we would call terrorists today even. That when I first went to Malaya

we were every now and again we’d get a day’s leave or something. We could walk down to the local village and usually run by Indians or something like that and they were Chinese.

Tengah. Tengah air field on Singapore Island and we had to wear civilian clothes because what was happening with these terrorists, if you had to hop on a bus

they’d be out of sight of some of these areas, there was still a bit of bush around. They’d hold up the bus and anybody in uniform they’d just shoot. Nice fellas, yeah.

No, not really close calls with that but we had to do that. It was happening. Oh it started to slow down after I got there.

I was there in the… it went from 1948 to 1960, long time, officially declared over in 1960… I was there in late ’53. So I was about in the middle of it and we were bombing two things. The idea of the British was to cut off the food supply to these terrorists. So any time a garden was discovered growing vegetables that wasn’t

any where near a village, it was obvious that what it was. We’d bomb it, destroy it and then go round and strafe the area as well. And the other thing, if there was an operation on by either British or Australian army, actually contact the terrorists, they would make contact but before they actually go in they call in the Lincolns and we would go and bomb that area and strafe that area.

Then they would go in and clean up what was left. We’d get a bit of feedback now and again from that and it was helping, was doing the job.

No. No way in the world. The only results I’ve ever seen is in another book I’ve got here. That photograph taken of a bombing one of these gardens. What we did to that. Sounds crazy bombing a garden but they were vegetable gardens growing food for the terrorists

and we had to destroy their food supply, which we did.

Not at all, no. I mean I might a killed dozens. I don’t know cause I had a couple a one trip at least on the tail [gun position]. Another one in the mid upper [gun position]. But the other, most of the other ones, I was on the radio. Mmmm.

Oh yeah, well that’s what it was. Mmmm. Radio operator, air gunner.

Very, very lonely I can tell ya. Very lonely and if we had to get out in a hurry, well we’d have to align the turret so the door was at the back. I could open onto the fuselage. Reach in behind me, grab my parachute off the

stowage, bring it back, hook it on, close the doors and if everything was okay just press this control to rotate the turret. Open the doors and fall out backwards. Or if the hydraulics were gone I had a little wheel I could hand – I could wind the turret around manually on the right. Very lonely place and if there’s a fire on board the aircraft well it acts like a chimney.

It just goes straight down out through the tail turret.

No. I don’t think we had too many casualties, the Lincolns there. The British seemed to have more casualties than we did. The Royal Air Force were flying Vampires and a couple of other types and they lost a few of the aircraft and aircrews. We had a few Lincolns, we lost a couple a Lincolns, but

they’re mainly by mechanical failures and I wasn’t there all that long. I was only there for three months then I, that’s actually flying. I spent a month in the British military hospital in Singapore then with skin diseases I picked up.

Yeah, that was funny really. I went to our MO [Medical Officer] and that they first showed themselves up on the soles of my feet and he’d said, “Oh that’s a

type of tinea.” Tinea people think, oh bit of stuff you get between your toes, bit of athlete’s foot or something but actually there’s many types of tinea, which I was to learn, and they said, “Oh you I’d better send you into the BMH,” British Military Hospital, in Singapore. So they sent me in there and I saw the doctor in there. So I was admitted then cause they had to take scrapings and do all sorts a tests and all kinds a things. Find out

about the particular tinea. How they could treat it and all the rest of it. So I spent a month in there. Then I was sent home, back to Australia. Finished up in number 3 RAAF Hospital in Richmond but the month I was there, being a military hospital the doctor came round you would lie to attention or you would sit to attention if you’re out a bed or whatever and the meals, I can remember

one meal in particular that had just potato. There’s seven kinds of potatoes. If I can remember it all: there’s what we call a scallop potato, the chip potato, the mashed potato, the boiled potato, the baked potato. Yeah, all potatoes. Seven different kinds of potato. That was it. That was the meal.

I thought, “My God. What are these English living on?”

I thought I was in Ireland or something.

Well you eat them or went hungry, one or the other. Yeah. It was I can’t remember the other two but they were probably something like potato with cheese or but I don’t remember anything except just potato in different forms. They might a been straw things like they call French fries and then the ordinary chips or wedges or

I don’t know but I just remember now seven types. I can remember that. Another thing I learnt there that one of the chaps, British army, not the bed opposite but I think it was the bed but one, he didn’t have, a he had no education. He couldn’t read or write and I thought that unusual but later on I found out there’s quite a lot of them couldn’t read or write.

Well in Malaya again we were on what had been a Japanese air base at Tengah. It was well built and we were in permanent it was built for permanency, barracks and the walls were louvres, permanently open cause quite a hot place. They were permanently open. We always used to always sleep with the doors and windows and everything else we could open as well but the toilets always amused me. They had showers

and the toilets had no seats. They only had the squats position. The footprint things. You put your feet on these footprint things and you squatted. That’s how you used the toilet but that’s what always amazed me. But that was shared by the Royal Air Force and the Royal Australian Air Force, Tengah.

They were quite different cause with if we had storms they were short, sharp. Not that much fog. I don’t

remember much fog at all but there was a lot of rain almost every afternoon. You’d say, “Three o’clock, it’s almost time for rain. Better get in under cover somewhere.” You know there’s things like that and the whole place was built to shed a lot a water as quickly as possible.

Didn’t see an awful lot of it. I think I only spent one day in Singapore

on leave. The rest of the time I was in the hospital and it was pretty run down, dirty. Nothing to be proud of if you lived there and become a Singaporean. I suppose that’s all been rebuilt too now.

No. I’d like to. I know at one stage about twenty years ago, twenty five years ago, the Korean

government offered Australian veterans from the Korean War if they got back to Korea of their own means you get a free accommodation, free travel within the country but I didn’t have the money to pay to get back there. I would have liked to have seen what they done to rebuild the place and that sort a thing cause as I said, most of the time all I saw was the airstrips.

Well when I first was a Korean War veteran, particularly after I was discharged, I wanted to forget all about it. “It’s gone, it’s finished, forget it.” I couldn’t forget the Malayan bit cause I’ve still got the skin problems. They don’t seem to know any cure for it but no, just forget all about it. Get on with life. Do something else. So that’s when I decided after discharge

to, well I realised you could get a Rehabilitation Training Scheme going and if you’re under twenty one at the time of enlistment, which I was, you’re eligible to apply. So I applied for tertiary training but I wasn’t qualified to go into a university. So I had to go back to night school for three years to qualify to enter University of Sydney as a dental student

but big problem there was the, as you’ll see some of the paper work there, the allowance was eight pound three and sixpence a fortnight for a wife and child. Not much money at all and the allowance they gave for books and equipment was hardly enough to even scratch the surface of what was required. So I had to go out and work

on weekends to earn some money. course you can’t do that. You gotta study and study and study. So I failed the first year and I repeated that and I passed with a, not with honours but the next one down, credit. The second year, I got into second year. Second year stopped me again. So I spent three years and I could have continued under my own steam and pick up again with the rehab if I had passed second

year, but I couldn’t afford that. So that was the end of another chapter.

I got no idea really because it was all so fast. I was away from the unit for a month. I didn’t know much what was going on. One chap did

come in once and offer to oh he brought my pay book and my pay and everything else, but I said, “No, I don’t want any money.” Didn’t need any money. Nothing to spend it on much.

Not really not very really, no. No I was just the odd bod that was shipped in and took up a spot in the crew. I didn’t gamble, didn’t drink. So see you know you’ve got to be in with the crowd to be in with the crowd so to speak and

not drinking, not gambling. I did try two up for a while for once and found out how quickly you can lose your money. Stopped that. Yeah.

Well yes and no. Some time in I think it’s ’53 or ’54 they like these orders, as I said, an order went out that all NCO aircrew were to make the nec… would not be offered

re-engagement and are to be off to make arrangements for return to civil life. So but I was that was basically aimed at the people on six-year engagement term, which a lot of, for a lot of them would have been coming up but I was a twelve-year man and I thought, “Hello, here’s a chance to get out,” cause I was a bit disappointed with the way things were going and I was medically unfit for tropical service from that point on.

So I’d been narrowed down a bit and they didn’t want us anyway. Didn’t want any more NCO aircrew. I was flight sergeant by that time. So and the aircraft were changing. The Canberra bomber was in and the Empire fighter was in and the propeller-driven aircraft were going out. Big change going on. They didn’t want air gunners any more when the Lincolns went. No air gunners and the radio op… radios were getting so

sophisticated that anybody could use them. So they didn’t need us any more. So I took the opportunity to apply for discharge and I discharged at own request.

Not so much Malaya but Korea more so cause I was more I was there a lot longer, I was more involved not only on a day-to-day basis but all day.

I was working practically every day of the month, sometimes twice a day. Did an awful lot of flying there.

To my?

Yeah, but they don’t seem to be interested. I think my son’s becoming interested at long last. Well he’s be thirty eight this month so it’s taken him a long time. The others couldn’t care less.

Got no idea really.

No idea at all. I suppose cause I was married afterwards and they were born long afterwards. It wasn’t as if they were around when that was on. You know it’s a bit like coming to Brisbane in ’84 and talking to people here for the ’74 floods. They say, “Oh well what the, what’s the flood? What was the problem about the floods and that?” If you’re not there you don’t know. You can’t expect, you can’t really understand a lot of it.

Well the only movies I’ve seen about the Korean War were American and they nearly always show the Americans winning of course but there’s not an awful lot, oh there’s been one I can remember was sort of left you hanging up in the air realising that

nobody was gonna win. People are gonna die. There was one with that showed the problems with the civilian population. That was a problem in I wasn’t caught up in that but I learnt about it. The fact that when the initial push from the north was coming in the civilian population’s all fleeing south blocking the roads and goodness knows what and the allies couldn’t move north and we

learned that early stage in amongst all these refugees was a lot of North Korean soldiers infiltrating. They were pushing prams. Instead of having a baby in there, it was full of hand grenades or something and that sort a thing. So it got to the stage where I know one American commander ordered his artillery to open fire on ’em and that was done.

I couldn’t tell you what year it was. Early in the piece. That’d be 1950 some time.

When they discovered that a lot of infiltrators were in amongst the refugees. If you let the whole thing come through they could of been in very serious trouble so they just opened fire on the whole column.

Experience? Oh in some ways it was, but in other ways – that the North [Korean] people haven’t learnt a thing.

They’re still got the same idea as what they had then. Fifty odd or fifty one years nearly later and they still want to rattle the sabres. You know the South [Koreans] went back to civilian life and they went back to manufacturing, which there wasn’t much there at all or hardly nothing fifty years ago but now it’s a major manufacturing area and the North has been in military bastion ever since. That’s all it’s ever been.

It used to be industrial but there’s more military than anything else. Has been for years.

No. Don’t know any Japanese either, although I came across one woman who had lived in Malaya when we were there bombing and must have been reasonably close to where, they had a rubber plantation somewhere cause she’s telling me how the all the crockery used to rattle in the

kitchen when the bombs were going off. Mmmm. That’s about as close as I’ve come to knowing anyone. It’s a strange situation. It’s a bit like some of the crews in submarines. They go from here to there, back again but they never see where they’re going or been and cause even when I was in the air force mostly what I saw was airstrips. Mmmmm.

Well in Korea I did. I knew I was evacuating wounded and taking supplies in and bringing troops out for recreation and that sort a thing. I knew all that was going on but apart from that, I didn’t know what the ships were doing, what the navy aircraft were doing or what the United States marines were doing or Australian Army. No idea. Read about it later.

Oh the aircrew?

Yeah. I know that was at Ballarat, Victoria, and I’d written to Mum and stepfather saying that what was happening.

Gave them the date and everything. So they drove down to Ballarat and unfortunately on their way down, the powers that be decided to postpone the whole thing for a week. Well that meant they’d either have to drive back to Sydney and miss it or take a week off work, each of them, and stay and then see the graduation cause that was on a big parade ground where you marched up and down in formations and all this sort of business. Then you come back and

those who are graduating out in the front. Commanding officer’s at the dais calling out your name one by one and you march up, salute. They didn’t pin anything on you, just handed the wing in your hand and gave another salute, turned around and marched back and but then the when everybody had their wing and he addressed the crowd to say, “They are now sergeants.”

That was it. It’s all over. Most of the time was taken up by marching around, a bit of a display and then marching off and my mother was very proud.

I can’t really remember but I know she was quite proud that I graduated and mmmm.

Yeah, I would of been. Yeah wrote to him but he had his business going and he couldn’t take time off to come down.

Oh yes and no. Yeah. He would of been, liked me to go in the army rather than the air force I think cause he was an army man. Mmmm.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Oh crikey, that’s just general things I think cause the thing is when I came back from Korea

not long after that, a month or so, in the mail arrived the Korean War medals. So I remember I did go to see him one time and I was wearing the ribbons. I had to explain what they were. Mmmm, but there wasn’t an awful lot. We used to talk about family and friends and not much about war at all.

We did march together in one Anzac Day, yeah. Just one.

It was. Yeah, it was. Just the one, but I think I shifted to from Brisbane after that. Came to Brisbane in ’64.

Yeah. I used to write. Got letters and everything.

I can’t remember that one. Nothing spectacular. You know nothing that’d make her worry. I used to steer clear of everything like that.

Mum could write about whether the cats were scratching their leg or there was ants in the backyard or anything like that. She could really write a letter, just those nonsensical things. Mmmm. Just as all those

things go on and always will. They keep going. No matter what happens. There’s always little things like that. My stepfather may have bought another car or something like that.

Yeah, pretty close. I think about as far as I can see, about evenly divided. Mmmm.

Dream about

it? Yeah I dreamt about it, yeah. Even today I dream about it. The worst part I thought it was when I was living at Balmoral for a long time, only been here seven years, and not that far from the airport and when the particularly the propellers of an aircraft and a bit earlier when the earlier jets were revving up to take off a lot of noise coming across and I’d be lying there in bed you know when you’ve got trying get to sleep

and I’d hear all this noise and I reckoned I could feel the vibrations. I blamed it all on the airport. Then later on when I started to go out west looking for wild pigs to shoot and things like that lying in bed there. I could feel a vibration, I could hear the aircraft noises. That was a real revelation, yeah. I still do that occasionally, feel a vibration and hear the noises.

Psychological I suppose. I’m a nut case.

Yeah. The worst part’s feeling the vibration, particularly the Lincolns. They vibrate like billy-oh before you take off and even when you’re flying but…

I think the worst thing I call ’em nightmares. I’ve dreamt a few times now I’ve been back in the air force as an old man and a all these young boys and I’m there with a my medals and everything’s changed and I can’t get used to it and I’m getting into trouble cause I’m doing things wrong and that sort of thing. I call it a nightmare rather than a dream. Yeah that’s happened a few, not a lot but a few times over the years.

More so that way than not really flying. I don’t think I’ve that much dreamed about really flying.

No, not really. I know at one stage I would have liked to have got me own pilot’s licence, getting a pilot’s licence, but I never had the money to do it. So that was the end of another dream. Change direction again.

Oh well I was working in the Commonwealth Department of Works laboratory at North Ryde, Sydney, doing all the tests on materials used for roads and aerodrome construction and my wife came from Laidley, Queensland. She wanted to get back to Brisbane, or Queensland. So I said, “Well why not?” At that time I’d be talking to my father and he’d be saying, “Don’t tell your mother

this.” Later on I’d be talking to my mother and she’d say, “Don’t tell your father this,” and this sort of thing was going on. I thought, “Oh this is nuts. This is crazy. Get away from the whole darn thing. If they want to have a bit of an argument, let ’em fight it out amongst ’emselves.” So the wife wanted to get back to Queensland. So there was a few vacancies coming up, internal mail, in the department. So I applied for a couple and missed out and then finally got the job. The laboratory was at Nott Street, South Brisbane.

Similar work. Bit more primitive laboratory set up and everything but the department, unbeknownst to me at the beginning, they met all the expenses of shifting up. I thought I would have to pay it. That’s one reason I wasn’t too keen at first and I was getting close to shift up and it was over a thousand pounds or something and then when the government paid for it, it was only a couple a hundred. You know it’s a terrific difference but they paid the bill so and they shifted everything up

and we stayed with my wife’s parents for a few months until we bought the place at Balmoral. Shifted in there in ’64. Then after the divorce I had to sell it. Sold it in ’95, ’96. Finalised ’96.

Yeah. Yeah and I did an awful lot of work there.

I replaced all the galvanised iron plumbing with copper and dug out underneath and concreted it and built a dark room underneath and put concrete paths everywhere and rebuilt landscaping and oh work an awful lot of work at that place. Same as I’ve done with this place, since I’ve been here. Did a lot concreting and not all not quite all. I didn’t do that bit out the front and I had

so many other things. I had that big shed built and I had the awning put on and the side deck put on but a lot of the other paths and everything else. A lot of the stuff downstairs. It’s just like a another house down there. Another flat if you like and I actually I lived down there for a year while my second daughter and her children were living up here while they were changing house and then when I was there

at Nott Street, part of the job was to go to country airports while they were being rebuilt and do all the testing and I spent a month at Cairns. That was in ’65, 1965 I spent a month up in Cairns. The old Cairns, nothing like it is now. Completely changed, rebuilding an airport

and I thought, well I was keen to start a university course. I wanted to graduate at something. So I couldn’t do that if I was spending time away from Brisbane. So this saw this job advertised in the paper at the University of Queensland. So I applied for that and got it. I had to drop a little bit in salary at first, the first six years, and I was working in the Department of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering at the old George Street area,

which later on became QUT [Queensland University of Technology] and that moved out to St Lucia area ’68 when they were rebuilding or building new buildings and new departments. There were a lot of departments at George Street still moving out. Pharmacy, engineering, electrical and mechanical engineering, metal engineering. One by one they moved out as new accommodation was built and

I worked for various people there doing PhDs. I was their technician, doing all their work and the last couple of years I was working with a German-born chap. There was more forensic work than anything else. Like you, you know, say a bus is driving down the street and suddenly it goes off into the scrub and accident or something and somebody

says, “Oh the driver was drunk. He didn’t know what he was doing.” The driver says, “No, the steering broke.” So we’d investigate the parts. The police would send in parts for investigation. Investigate that I had to prepare all the samples for investigations, although I could do some of the investigation but I didn’t make any reports, or somebody would say, “I was driving down the street and the steering broke and I ran into a tree.” We’d do the

investigation on that and, “No, the steering didn’t break. The accident broke it, not the other way round.” So a lot of things like that. A lot of materials apart from metals but there was ceramics, glasses, plastics, even chicken bones. Things like that had to be investigated. Why they broke or didn’t meet up to service. Didn’t last as long as they were supposed to and had to devise various testing procedures to test oils and lubricants.

The effect on ball bearings and that sort of stuff.

It was quite satisfying, yeah. Rotten boss though. Everybody else except this bloke was. He was all right to talk to while I was working for somebody else but when I started to work under him, oh I could of shot him. He was one of those type you know and then a vacancy came up for the veterinary school so I applied for that. It was a step up in rank and money. So I got that

but while I was in the mining and met department I enrolled for a science degree but I had that many commitments at home, I couldn’t study again and you’ve got to have time to study. So.

It’s interesting, yeah. Yeah. Especially when for one year I had four teenage daughters. 19, 17, 15 and 13 and the phone rang I didn’t bother to answer it. “It’s not for me.”

Even though I tried to start a business going with photography and other things but no, they dominated the telephone. Yeah and…

Oh yeah. I made up for it, yeah but to answer the question that was asked earlier, when I was studying dentistry at the University of Sydney dental students and medical students did the same first year

and same second year basically, except the fact that dentists we didn’t study the arms and legs. We studied the rest of the body same as the medical students. They studied the arms and legs as well. So if there’s anything about sex you want to know, anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, done the lot. I mean done the lot.

Oh yeah,

primitive, very primitive. Mmmm, but then again most people know more about their motor cars than they do about their own bodies, particularly men.

Being on the Senate, University of Queensland. Yeah when I was in the mining and met department at that time the university

was an entity to itself. It could do what it liked. It could give you holidays, take them away. You couldn’t complain to anybody but then in ’76 it finally went through. The senate had to press the government. They had to alter the law so that general staff could have some redress for grievance somewhere, somehow. So we came under the normal industrial laws then from ’76 onwards but even then a lot of the academic

staff didn’t want to know about it, didn’t want to have anything to do with it but of course they had to comply with it. They didn’t want to comply, so there’s arguments all the time and even some of the administrative staff didn’t like the idea but so there was a lot of problems to sort out. That’s when I became a union representative and then because there was one position on the senate as you’ll see in that book, wherever it is. Did you see it? One position for a member of general staff.

I put my name in the ring for that but another chap was elected but then when the next time came round I was elected and I was elected three times in all to the senate. So you’re there with the senate running like being a member of state parliament if you like. Very formal meetings, very formal. You stood up to speak and all this business and…

Well I saw my role as a member of general staff to put the general staff point of view because academics could only see the academic point of view and there was representatives from church and from students and from industry and from government. They all put their points of view when things came up for discussion but none a those others ever thought about the general staff and the majority of the staff were general staff. There is a

group which was established a bit later on. It was the research staff. So there’s three groups of staff. There’s the academic staff, the research staff and the general staff. Now the general staff, they do all sorts of jobs from gardening to running departments virtually and they’ve all qualifications from nothing up to PhDs, in some cases full doctorates, but they’re still general staff and a lot of

the academics look down their nose at the general staff even though they that particular person they’re looking down their nose at may be more highly qualified than what they are and more experienced. Quite a well a humorous situation at times. Farcical.

Oh it gave me, a gave me a status if you like. Gave me a voice. It gave me an avenue. Gave me a road to

I could speak to the vice chancellor any time I wanted to and any other departments I could ring up and as a member a technical officer in general staff I could ask questions but some places would say, “Oh I don’t, I’m not sure if I’m allowed to answer that.” I’d say, “Well you can tell me now or I can ask the question in senate,” and ‘bingo’ they’d give me the answer straight away then because I could answer the, I could ask the question in senate and demand an answer. They couldn’t refuse

but even the first meeting that I attended at the senate there’s thirty two members of senate. Huge round table, you’ll see by that photograph, and there’s members of senate but also as well as the members of senate there’s the university legal officer, the registrar, a secretary taking notes of the whole proceedings. I think that’s all.

They’re not members but they have to be there [to] answer questions and provide information and so on and I can remember the first meeting of the new senate, ’84, 1984, Walter Campbell, Sir Walter Campbell, he was the chancellor of the previous senate. The first duty of the new senate each time every fourth year when they’re elected

is to elect a chancellor and a deputy chancellor. So I mean any member of senate can be elected to that position, which meant I could have been if I got the numbers to vote for me but usual practice was to elect a knight of the realm. Always had been a knight of the realm. So Sir Walter Campbell, he was re-elected and he took the chair then as chancellor. So they had to have a ballot for

deputy chancellor. Or vice chancellor no, deputy chancellor. Vice chancellor’s a different thing. Deputy chancellor. So on the table in front of every member of senate there’s a big blotting paper thing, the old style office thing and in one of the corners there’s half sheets of paper, ruled paper, a brand new pencil nicely sharpened and in front copies of that book, that calendar so you can

refer to anything if you want. So right, we have a ballot for deputy chancellor. They have a ballot. So a few people were nominated and seconded and I think there was three names. So you take a piece of paper, write a name on it, fold it over and then Sir Walter Campbell looked at Dr Rayner, the registrar. He said, “Sam, you will collect the ballot.”

Well Dr Rayner got up and he said, “Oh but Mr Webster’s a…” He meant to say, “He’s a member of general staff, he can give me a hand,” sort of thing. He didn’t get very far and Sir Walter Campbell cut him so short like a knife. He said, “Mr Webster is a senator. You will collect the ballot.” I’d like to see him cause at that time Sir Walter Campbell was a chief

judge in the High, the Queensland Supreme Court and oh boy could he cut out. And yeah, so I just sat there and handed my ballot paper to the registrar as he come around. He didn’t like it being told off because I was a senator, not just a mere member of general staff you know and that was a… I liked Wally Campbell after that. He was good but then I could say anything at about anything in the senate

and I could initiate things for discussion and one thing I brought up I was there was no real safety issue. No safety officer, no safety committee. Nothing to do with safety. There was one officer. He was both a security officer and the safety officer at St Lucia for the whole University of Queensland, which at that time not only St Lucia but fifty other sites around the state and there’s still quite a lot of sites

around the state now, although some have become universities in their own right. Like Cook at Queen at Townsville, now it’s a university in its own right, and the safety angle came up and I brought that up and I stood up and I wanted to talk about the safety issue at the University of Queensland. Now what’s your… how to go about it. This is my first meeting, remember. I was quite nervous and I was very shy before this. This really brought me out of me shell.

It’s probably answered the first question about that I were too shy to bring it up and I stood up. I asked I was gonna ask about it. I said, “Oh I’ll pursue it through the office.” “Oh no, no, no. Come on. You can tell us. You can tell us,” you know? “We’ll help you out,” and so, “I want to speak about a safety committee. There’s nothing in the University of Queensland on safety except one officer who has two jobs. We need a

proper safety committee. Safety section. Safety department, whatever you’d like to call it.” “Mmmm.” So they put that on the business paper for the next meeting and before the next meeting came up there was a fatal accident in the department of chemical engineering. So the vice chancellor rang up and spoke to me about it and then there was a committee investigation into the death and I was on that and then after that

I was asked to start proceedings going for appointment of a safety officer with a committee with like with his helping staff and have a proper safety section, which that little thing there was they presented to me when I retired. Yeah, so that’s

That was my baby. Yeah. I was the chairman of the committee while it was on

and there was another thing, when I was I was elected I was the one time I was a uni representative, professional officers’ association, which was a union covering technical staff. I was president of the general staff association and I was a member of senate. So I was wearing those three hats at one time and

the I was gonna say there, oh the general staff association I think there was ’90, ’80, 1980 something was the anniversary and the university called for projects for to commemorate the University of Queensland and so on.

So somebody in the general staff proposed a chapel cause the University of Queensland at that time didn’t have a chapel. There was a chapel in some of the colleges but they’re only residential colleges, they’re not teaching colleges but the university itself really had no chapel of any kind. So the reply back from that was that while they thought it was a sound idea, it would not be pursued for at this time

but that when I was the vice president. After I become president I landed in me lap this chapel. I pursued that. We got to the point where it had various plans submitted and there was several people just didn’t want it full stop, and one of them was the chairman of the buildings and grounds committee, no not the chairman, it was a member. He was the buildings and grounds

officer but he had most things to say at the meetings and he did all he could to block anything about a chapel but I finally got it past that because I was a member of that committee appointed by senate. I was a member of several committees appointed by senate and it finally got to the senate and you’ll read in some of this stuff here how far it went. Still not established but it went a long way. I found out later on that the

vice chancellor himself didn’t want it and he blocked it at every opportunity. It got to the point of going through senate to have to collect funds for it but the way it was worded it had to be authorised. Well if nobody wanted to authorise it, it couldn’t be done and who would authorise it and how was it authorised and so it was just it was a good way of killing it. So there’s no chapel yet

but it went through senate and

It’s there. It’s still on the books as far as I know and

The war experience? Well I think basically, I won’t say yourselves but basically in general

people today don’t appreciate or even understand where their money comes from. They think they do. They’ve really got no idea unless they’re out of work and no dole money coming in. The trouble is today, if you’re out of work you put your hand out, you put two hands out and the government fills it up with money. So you really don’t understand where money comes from. Got no idea and a lot of people blow their money. Got no idea of

saving it for some specific purpose, to buy a house. They’d rather buy a car or a TV set or a DVD or but not a house but they can’t look beyond tomorrow and the other thing, I know me own children, they don’t want to go without. I mean my experience in the Depression and Second World War and my own war experience, you have to go without things at times and you learn to go without

and even when I was a student at Sydney Uni I had to go without a lot of things there too because we were living on a pittance but the people today, no. They get married, they want to have a new house, they want everything in it. A new television set, a DVD and all the electrical gadgets they can think of. Air conditioning. It’s all gotta be there as soon as they move in. It took me thirty years to get a lot of stuff. Forty years to get some stuff.

Oh no, don’t want that. They want it now.

War is different now because it’s become more far more technical than it ever was. I mean it’s the First World War was had the first flying in it. That was one great technical leap in wartime. The Second World War took [it] a lot further. They had a lot of radio and radar control things. They had even pilotless bombs in those days, flying bombs, another great technical leap forward.

Well now and the Korea War was much the same as the Second World War. There was hardly anything different really. Same aircraft, except at later stages the jets but basically most of it was the same weapons, the same systems, the same everything but the Gulf War, this last one, which showed just how far technically with the whole world is advanced where you can have completely pilotless aircraft, not just pilotless bombs, but pilotless aircraft

launching rockets and bombs and things and returning to base.

No, I never believed it’d happen. It’s just like my grandmother used to say, “When they put a man on the moon I’ll believe anything.” They did. Put a man on the moon. Been there more than once. Space travel is now a possibility.

Just like television. They talk about television, Australia was very slow to pick up television. It didn’t happen here until ’54. It was in England and America before that and then the idea of a video recorder, or a video player. “Oh can’t do that. It’s impossible,” and now they’re digital to replace that and soon I’ve read where that that’ll be replaced by something else soon.

So it’s a great leap forward. Actually I started before Christmas to list everything that became available or invented by from 1940 onwards that just wasn’t there or wasn’t available if it was there. Like penicillin was available to the armed forces but not the civilian population until 1945. So from 1940

it wasn’t available to civilians and even then it was hardly available to anyone and the things that invented or become available since 1940 I’ve got about twenty pages, seventeen lines to a page, of just one heading. Bankcards, digital phones, television, digital whatever. There’s so many things that we see every use in every day but there’s also heaps a things that we don’t really

see. Like there’s a lot of things in air navigation that airlines use but we don’t know about. Lots a things with sea navigation the same. There’s lots a things like that they are used by a specific group that the rest of the world uses and benefits from but they don’t really know much about it but the big thing I think in summation about today’s younger people as compared to years ago is lack of responsibility. They just don’t wanna know.

Nobody wants to take responsibility. Classic case of that just recently on the Gold Coast where some youngsters were jumping off a bridge somewhere in the Gold Coast and one broke his neck. It was on television and it showed them taking the chap away on a stretcher and the camera’s saying how, “Not supposed to jump off this bridge. Look, there’s a sign there that says ‘No jumping off the bridge’,” and one young teenager said, “Yeah but who’s supposed to police that? Who’s supposed to police it?”

Meaning, “I don’t want to accept the responsibility for my own actions. Somebody’s gotta be looking over my shoulder saying, ‘Hey you can’t do that,’ all the time.” People don’t wanna accept responsibility for their own actions any more. In almost every field. It stands out like neon signs at times.

Sorry really?

Extraordinary? No I don’t

think it’s extraordinary really except that when I come up against people that like my best friend’s is a solicitor and I just thinks it’s normally but you give him a screwdriver and you say, “Which end do you hold on to?” You know I mean he’s a big man in the law in his business. He’s a well up in his own company and everything else. Many years. He’s

a specialist in insurance claims and deals with big claims in the millions but little things I think are little, he’s got no idea.

Well things I experienced in the vet school, cause I was working there as a technical officer. Yeah that’s another field that

a lot of people don’t understand. When there’s experiments are carried out on animals they think that’s cause horrible things being done but even tablets you now give to a dog for heartworm, [there] had to be experiments carried out to find out if they worked or if they don’t kill the dog as well as the worm and that sort of thing. They were going all the time but the animals are very well looked after. I mean animal liberationists, they’re a pain in the neck and they’re ignorant. They really don’t know what they’re on about. Sure, there’s been cases of

animal cruelty. So’s been cases of wife cruelty and even husband cruelty but they’re miniscule compared to the whole overall picture but that’s what gets all the publicity. You know somebody wife gets beaten up by some big bloke, well that’s all over the papers and, “Oh that’s a bit…” but how many of that happens now? When there’s millions of people in the country that live happy normal lives.

Well I’ve been

satisfied with it, yeah put it that way. I’m a bit disappointed. I’ve had my disappointments. Disappointed with my children, the way they act at the moment. Disappointed with my wife. Well that was a thing that I could see something was happening there long before she come out with that, “Let’s sell up and split.” I tried to tell my eldest daughters that, “There’s something wrong with Mum. I don’t know what it is but she’s not acting it’s not like she used to be. There’s something wrong with her,” but they wouldn’t listen.

I tried to talk to our family doctor but he thought I was talking about sexual attitudes. It wasn’t that. Anyway after the whole thing was over, the divorce and everything else, she was diagnosed with manic depression, which they now call polar disease. She’s on treatment now. She’s a receiving treatment for that but if they listened to me earlier they’d have found it earlier and treated it earlier. We’d probably still be married

but nobody wanted to listen. That’s probably the one of the greatest disappointments.

Oh yeah. It’s like a rollercoaster.