Australians at War Film Archive

Hello gang. My name is Iain David Brotchie. Iain is spelled differently I-A-I-N which is an ancient Scottish way of spelling it. My students at the International College, I usually pose them a question at the very beginning of the semester, “Where do I come from?”

yet I point out to them that I’m a naturalised Australian. I think they spend more time researching trying to find out where I come from than they do the whole subject. They’re allowed one question a week only and my idea is to try to get the whole class to talk together first and then ask one question. It’s amazing in 12 questions they can usually find it out. My family actually comes from the Orkney Islands which is from the north of Scotland and a couple of hundred years ago we moved into the

north end of Scotland mainly as itinerant workers, cobblers in fact. Moving around – journeymen they are called. It’s very similar – I’ve almost come right full circle because now I’m a contractor as well doing very similar things. Rather than doing full-time work I work anywhere for freedom. So maybe there’s something built into the genes I don’t want to be a part of a democracy. However, I was actually born in Northern Ireland at a place called

Antrim in a little cottage in Lord O’Neill’s castle. My father was stationed there during the Second World War when he returned from the expeditionary forces in France. It was an interesting story because they scattered them all over the world at that time because they were the people who were left behind after Dunkirk. And they got out. And he was there and Mum

joined him there and in 1942 on the 16th May 1942 I was born in a Lord’s castle. The interesting thing was the family that we were living with at that time spoke Gaelic and my mother and father also spoke Gaelic but coming from the north of Scotland a different version of it. So for the first couple of years of my life in which I was in Ireland I was actually speaking Gaelic. I don’t know a

word of it any more. However, after the end of the war Dad got out and was demobbed after 7 years in the army and we moved into Glasgow. This was the old Glasgow, the tough old Glasgow, a dirty town and everything. And we moved into one of the big tenement buildings at that time. It’s since been torn down. I was there for 7 years and my recollections of that time is a little bit of

wandering the streets I suppose. And I do remember a lot of fights or confrontations there - a very noticeable thing in Glasgow at the time. My Mum and Dad decided to emigrate. The easiest way to say this is my father’s attitude was far as Britain was concerned was, “Pull the plug and let the bloody place sink”. That was his thing. We were going to go to

South Africa because in fact one of his brothers had gone there and how we ended up in Australia I’m not quite sure. However, my mother’s brother was actually here in Brisbane he’d emigrated a little bit earlier than we did. We came out in 1949 so that was probably the trigger to come here to Brisbane. And we came out on a boat called The Moreton Bay, which was rather appropriate being here. It wasn’t a luxury liner or a cruise liner it was

actually a cargo ship. It took us twelve weeks sailing here through the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea and right across the Indian Ocean. Stopping off everywhere and dropping stuff off and picking stuff up. There were about 25 passengers on board so it was a relatively small group of people. There was no entertainments officer or anything like that so the parents had to do something with a rowdy group of children there

particularly after a while when they found that some of the boys like myself were down in the engine room exploring the ship, rather a dangerous thing. So they did lots of stuff. And my father being a little, tiny Scotsman, not one of the big highlanders or anything like that, he taught us boxing and self defence. And we had fashion parades. We had swimming things and I think anything I think they could do to keep us entertained day after

day. I think that’s where my background – I was socialised or influenced by my father’s fighting background I think which is why even now I’m still in the martial arts here. It’s interesting how it sort of triggers you I suppose. So we arrived in Brisbane in 1949 and we were put into a refugee camp. Well a migrant camp over at Salisbury. Which were interesting

ones because they were old army huts – masonite with tar paper roofs. No windows, they just had big flaps which you pushed out. They had running water at the end of the hut and the toilets were outside of course at that time. And there were hundreds of us in there. My father immediately starting looking for work and he found some work at Salisbury and then moved to

I think Kelvin Grove where the Nam Shoe Factory was - so once again a bit of a link. I went to primary school at Salisbury Primary School which was just down the road. Me and the other group of guys from the camp, the boys. My first day there was a fight because it was us against he Australians and it was people like Scots like myself. And remember I was a Glasgow Scot [Scotsman]. I did not speak

English and they could not understand a single word I said. However, my written English in fact was far better than theirs. Of course with us there were the Italians and Greeks and a few other people who were refugees at that time. So it was us against them. The first six weeks there were fights every day and that was fairly normal. “Why don’t you go home?” sort of thing. It sounds very similar to much of what’s happening these days. It really hasn’t changed at all.

My Dad - we were only in the camp for about 3 months all together and what he did is he bought a block of land at The Grange and started to clear it. He moved a little old hut onto the land up at the back so that we had somewhere and we moved into it. And this was a little tiny one-room little shack. Once again masonite with a tar paper roof. And it poured the first night and my recollection is of my Mum howling her head off about this country, it was

here. Eventually, using the Housing Commission, they made a house and it’s still there and looks very different these days. I went to school at the Wilson Primary School and finished there and went to Kedron Park High School which was almost a brand new high school because we were the second group there. There were no facilities. We used to have to take a spot of grass every day to school to help plant the oval so we could play on it. That’s how

rough it was at that time. I had quite a good time at high school and quite enjoyed it and I joined the military cadets at that time which were based there. So I had five years, sorry 4 years really, in the cadets and rose to the rank of under officer. The reason I’m mentioning that is it’s got some links with Vietnam as well there because I was offered the opportunity, having done my under officer’s course at the time, would I be interested in going to

Duntroon, the military academy. I made more enquiries about it and decided, “No” because Duntroon had not a very nice reputation at that time and that’s not the way you train people. So I decided not to. We couldn’t afford for me to go to university and I got a job in the hospital because by this time my father had actually started to work at the Royal Brisbane Hospital

because one of the jobs he had done in Scotland was an orderly in the Royal Infirmary Hospital in Glasgow. So he got the job as a plaster orderly at the Royal Brisbane putting plasters on broken limbs. And he was very good. He was in the emergency unit which they called casualty at that particular time. The reason I’m talking about that is most of the doctors in Brisbane had to go through that as part of their first-year

training. So he pretty well picked up on all the brand new doctors on the way through particularly eventually the senior surgeons and the orthopaedic surgeons who went on to their specialities. They all know Jock. Later on I mixed with most of those in our medical team in Vietnam so they knew him and all that sort of thing and there was a bit of a link there. I went to work in the Royal Brisbane Hospital as a radiographer, taking X-rays there.

I really enjoyed that and was studying part time. At the same time I was doing that I also joined the CMF [Citizens Military Force] which was the precursor to the Reserve these days at Enoggera and I really enjoyed that. At that time we were all volunteers. We did it for the sheer fun of it. A little bit later on, during the Vietnam period, then people who decided not to

go to Vietnam could join the Reserve there. And things changed at that time. You had people there who didn’t really want to be there so it wasn’t quite so comfortable. However, I enjoyed myself in the CMF and did a lot of training there even the Canungra training courses and things like that. And there were certainly a group of us who had been contemplating very serious volunteering for full-time duty in Vietnam at that time. How much we were influenced by the

NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers] because many of the NCOs who trained us had been to Malaya, the confrontation there, and Vietnam as part of the training groups there and had come back. So, yes, you were influenced by them there. But also they were very realistic in what they were telling you to. So it was not death and glory and all that sort of thing it was pretty bloody stuff. However, I worked in the Royal Brisbane Hospital, I

worked in casualty and there were lots of accidents particularly on Friday and Saturday nights. It’s really very bloody stuff which once again was fairly good training when you tend to take it into a war situation. Maybe not guns so much but the trauma is virtually the same sort of thing. About half way through as a radiographer, getting a little bit sort of tired of doing the job I

think, and being involved with the CMF, thinking about Vietnam at the time, being in favour basically of the general approach, maybe not of how they were actually doing it but of the general approach. It was certainly very much an anti-communist type of society then. And do your little bit as well and also being a young, stupid guy there was a bit of adventure in there too. I heard

from another friend who’d been a radiographer in South Australia that he’d just come back from Vietnam as part of a medical team. I didn’t know anything about this at the time. And he said, “Why don’t you think about it because Queensland is going to send a team fairly soon”. We knew nothing about it at all. So I immediately beetled along to the medical superintendent and I said, “I’m volunteering”. He said, “For what?” and he had no idea. Eventually the paperwork came through and we formed a team

basically from the Royal Brisbane Hospital but in fact the team doctor, the senior doctor, was Doctor Sale from Rockhampton Hospital and other people sort of gravitated in. So it was more a Queensland team I suppose. I had to decide do I go to Vietnam in the military or do I go in a medical team. It seemed a bit of a safer option and probably the only sensible thing I ever did there and it’s still helping. So OK I went that

way. The army had no problems so I got out of there. And I actually haven’t gone back again at all probably as a result of seeing what really happened in warfare and deciding, “No, that’s not a career for me,” so I toddled off to Vietnam and I’d have to admit had a good war, all the way through. Being obviously not quite in the front line although we were

certainly shot at and rocketed and a few other things like that. But it’s certainly a much safer experience than being at the front of an infantry squad or something like that. In Vietnam the main things that I recall while I was there that we were there during the Tet offensive at that time. And that was very interesting because we were at a big party

run by the Provincial Governor all celebrating Tet, the Chinese New Year. And then we recognised that people started to disappear. What was going on around the place and then of course after a while we picked up that something big was happening. Nobody realised really how big it was going to be. But Tet hit us or the Viet Cong actually hit us there and all hell broke loose. We were actually a medical team, we were a civilian medical

team, really treating civilians in the Bien Hoa which is one of the big towns about 30k [kilometres] outside Saigon associated with the big American air base. And the point is that the Viet Cong used to rocket the air base and of course the rockets would miss because they were pointed roughly in the right direction and with the size of the air base you could almost hit anything, it was so big, but it landed in the town. So we had rockets dropping into the town and falling short and all that type of thing quite a lot.

And of course in a town like that which is chaotic as far as traffic is concerned, there’s all these traffic accidents, so the Australian government had been providing a medical team there for quite some time. And there’s also a couple of other teams further down in the delta there really just to help the civilian people. The hospital originally was built by the Foreign Legion, by the French. One of the regiments as it was actually going through up towards the north actually built the hospital at that time.

And there was a doctor, there were twelve nurses, and about 250 patients. They needed help. They were civilians, not soldiers, and the resources were going elsewhere so our job was to step in and do anything we possibly could at that time. So our team was a senior doctor and two junior doctors, one from the medical side and one from the surgical side, myself as a radiographer and also six registered nurses,

Three of which were surgical nurses and three were medical nurses. Now, that was the main team, which was going for about twelve months. Some people didn’t quite last the twelve months and came home early but basically twelve months. However, we were also augmented every three months by some specialists. These were the senior doctors in Brisbane. Not just the hospital doctors, they were in senior private practice – orthopaedic

surgeons, paediatricians and medical people – the whole range. And these were people at that time who were probably in their 40s and at the top of their profession as well. And they walked out of their job and their money, if you think about it, for 3 months and volunteered to come to Vietnam for 3 months to help the hospital. And they did. And every 3 months we’d get another group so it was interesting to see the support there. It also meant that the Vietnamese were getting very, very

good attention given the limited physical resources but certainly from the medical side. From our point of view it was an eye-opener because we saw stuff like very, very bad tuberculosis. We certainly had it in Australia at the time but nothing like we had there - the plague, leprosy and some horrendous accidents. The Vietnamese are mad drivers. However, a lot of

times they were driving over mines as well which didn’t do very much for the cars or the trucks or the people that were inside them. So all of a sudden we could be doing nothing and then have 30 people roll through the door. Mashed is probably the best way of thinking about it and all hell broke loose. That’s really what happened in the Tet offensive. It was in a very, very big scale. The Viet Cong were actually in the

town, in the main water tower, taking pot shots all over he place. They were attacking the air base but as a result of that they also came through the town as well. They came within about 200 metres of our quarters and just everything was on. I honestly don’t remember very much about the first four days. We didn’t sleep. We just kept going and going and going. And after 4 days we were virtually collapsing. Remember MASH [American television series based in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital] on TV [television] it was almost exactly the same

thing. It was extraordinary and the same sort of conditions as well. There was no electricity. The power was out and all this sort of stuff. So you’d do whatever you could. It tended to calm down a little bit after that time because nobody quite knew who was going to win. And then very slowly the South actually won. And it was interesting because it wasn’t just the Americans for the first time even the Vietnamese military actually started to fight a bit more

seriously. The white mice which is the police force in Vietnam because of their white shirts, actually fought back which was extraordinary. So the Viet Cong didn’t actually run into the reception they thought they were going to get. In some areas they were certainly welcomed in and in other areas they weren’t. The end result, particularly in our area, was the absolute decimation of the Viet Cong units that came in. They’d get trapped and they’d get bogged

down and they’d get slaughtered as well which had big ramifications for them later on. The other thing that was interesting is that much of their civilian infrastructure, their political side, actually came out of the woodwork at the same time thinking they were going to take over. And all of a sudden they were very, very visible. That wasn’t true in all cases. I’ve since heard that one of the Vietnamese senior nurses that we had, and I’m not quite so sure how

true this is, was in fact after the war, when they finally did win, became the Provincial Governor. Now she was a nurse in the hospital. We were lucky that the hospital never actually got attacked as such. It could have been because she was there I don’t quite know. OK. So we survived the Tet offensive and life carried on. We then surprised everybody because in May they tried again. Everybody

thought it couldn’t happen because they were so decimated. But they tried again. It was very limited this time. Once again they were very badly beaten. So we went through the offensive a second time, a smaller one. After that in about September my twelve months were up, September 1968, and we were relieved by another team and came home. When I came

home I went back to the Royal Brisbane Hospital. I got itchy feet. Also I had learned a lot. I grew up a lot in Vietnam and one of the interesting thing I realised was that these senior doctors, very intelligent, very bright people and of course in hospitals at the top of the hierarchy I found out that they weren’t quite that in real life. So it sort of opened my eyes up a little

bit that coming from a working class background and a lower level in the organisations and all of a sudden these very senior people are really not superior people – a big eye opener. And I could do anything I wanted. So I then moved to the Prince Charles Hospital here in Brisbane - a cardiac hospital really starting out here in Brisbane at that time in the cardiac area. So they were starting to do very cutting edge type of work

there. I became in charge of the X-ray Department there and I was very fortunate having a very supportive medical superintendent. We bought some fantastic equipment. As you’re doing this of course you’re starting to move up the ranks and you’re becoming a manager whether you like it or not and you’ve never had any training. I did correspondence training from RMIT [Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology] in Melbourne and then moved on to doing other training courses also from the

QIT [Queensland Institute of Technology] and places like that trying to find out something about management. This was always as a part-time person. I’ve never done any full-time study at all. After a while I get sick and tired of the Prince Charles Hospital and decide not only do I want that I want a total career change in some fashion. I had been doing a lot of management training and got into the training side of things as a trainer. And I decided OK maybe this is a future career.

So I moved out of the hospital system and made a very bad move into Queensland Public Service, particularly into the Queensland Health Department. When I walked through the door I realised the first ten people I knew I already knew from the hospital system so I decided I’ll move somewhere else like Industrial Relations. I did that within 6 weeks – it’s got to be an area I knew nothing about. I moved from into the area there of what’s called Corporate Services so finance, administration, info technology at that time,

HRM, [Human Resource Management] that sort of central group of people. I worked in there and eventually having moved in different government departments I was in the Senior Executive Service, at the top, as a Director of Corporate Service. My main job really though at that time was economic rationalisation. The Public Service was big, bloated and very inefficient and burned up a lot of money. Our job was actually to downsize it

in the best way we could by merging different departments because sometimes we realised that 3 branches were doing virtually the same thing in 3 different departments and it just wasn’t logical so all of this sort of thing. So although I was the director of corporate services I was really a change agent within the public servant there. That was my role. I did that pretty successfully. I lost my job 5 times in reorganisations and had to

find another one on the way through. After a while you get tired of even doing that so I thought well if I can do that in the public service can I do it outside? So I joined a company which at that time was called Morgan & Banks, one of the large recruitment companies, as a consultant. Sorry, an executive contractor is the word for it – consultant, whatever you want to call it. So I worked for them for a little while mainly where they needed links between their organisation and the public

service using my previous knowledge on that. By sheer coincidence I got a phone call from a woman and she said, “Iain, you don’t know me but I know you, do you want a job?” As a contractor you don’t ask what the job is. You say, “Yes,” and then you ask what the job is and then you figure out if you can actually do it. You don’t do it the other way. What it was

she said, “I’m at the QUT [Queensland University of Technology]. I’m running a very large first-year subject. I have 1800 students in the semester I need help”. How come me? Well as it works out I’d been doing part-time lecturing also and tutoring at the QUT in the radiography area and then moving into management areas with the science people. Trying to convince scientists that they do have to work in organisations and they do have to work with people and not

just equipment only. And I’d been using literally the same text book and she’d sort of caught on to this. She sort of said, “Can you come and give me help?” I had no other work to do and so I said, “Yes”. I went around to her place, this was on a Friday in fact, I went around to her place on the weekend and went through – it was amazing the same sort of textbook, roughly the same sort of approach. “When do I start?” “Monday.” “Good”. “When do the first lectures start?” “You start your first

lecture at 9 o clock on Monday morning”. “Oh Sugar”. So all hell broke loose. 1800 students and as well she had nearly 60 tutorial groups of 30 and it was chaotic. It just happened out of the woodwork. While I was in the public service I continued my academic studies and I’d done a Graduate Diploma of Business Administration and I’d gone to the University of Queensland and I’d done my

Masters in Public Administration because I thought if I’m in the public service I’ve got to know something about it. So I did my Masters there. I was going to do a doctorate and my wife threw up her hands in horror because somewhere along this line we had two sons, David and James. David is only 21 now and James is 19 so we were late starters. I thought I had a scientist for a wife and of course she changed careers in the way

through. So we had a young family and more study just wasn’t on at that time and I don’t regret that in any way. Maybe I’ll go back and do it later on. So I’ve had the academic side also to back up what I’d been doing. So I took on a contract to lecture and tutor in this subject “Management, people and organisations” – what I thought was going to be one semester which sort of happened to roll into

two semesters. And, “You may as well do Summer School as well while you’re at it,” and 3 years later I was still doing it as a sort of a part-time/full-time person rolling on semester by semester. Since then I’ve sort of backed off a little bit. I still work 3 semesters but not quite so much any more. I also do the same subject at the International College at Kelvin Grove. And

now I tend to teach at Carseldine and Caboolture a little bit out of hand rather at the main campus in the middle of the city which is too hard to get to. I enjoy my time at the international college because I teach that subject and I also teach a government subject there as well so it’s sort of building on my background in both those areas which is why I come back to the original thing of posing the question to all of these international students who are brand new to Australia and

shocked out of it and get one hell of a surprise when they hear me talking and then I tell them I’m a naturalised Australian from somewhere else. It intrigues them a great deal. We’ve come full circle I suppose there. So I’ve now got an academic career and I’ve been doing it now for over six years in some sort of fashion. I work about 20 hours a week in actual student contact and actual times there. I’m probably getting a little

tired of it because it’s basically working three semesters and I’m wondering what I’m going to do next for the rest of my life. My sons are now 21 and both at university. David is doing arts and law. I shock my international students as well because when David actually finished high school he was only 16 when he finished high school, too young for university. So being the absolute

bastard that I am I packed him off to Japan for twelve months. So he went back to High School in Efu in Japan, the only round eye in the whole town I think at that time. He certainly enjoyed himself and made lots and lots of friends and came back speaking very good conversational Japanese, very good, which he then took up at university. So he has studied Japanese at uni and in fact gone as high as he can

both at the QUT and the University of Queensland. He’s using that also as a mix with his law degree. He’s got a couple of years to go. My other son James is very, very different. They’re like chalk and cheese the two boys. He’s an engineer. Well, not yet. He’s doing aerospace avionics at the QUT. He may not go to Mars but is very likely to be working on

that sort of electronics in aeroplanes. That’s his field and his expertise which is very different from an arts type of person. I’m now 62 years old. I show my students, and I point out to them that as young undergraduates they’ve got to expect the fact that

they’re not only going to change jobs they are going to change careers probably 3 times in a lifetime. So I use myself as a bit of an example of that one. I then point out that the models that say this happens usually terminate around the age of 65 because everybody retired at the age of 65. It would appear that’s not going to be true any more so we’re sort of contemplating what is my next career going to be. And I have no idea

at all. I had originally thought that I might have by this time having retired from everything else fallen into more of a martial arts role because I’ve been studying it now for 50 years right from the very beginning through a variety of things. I’m a 5thdan, a 5th degree black belt in 9 Ru or 9 schools in the martial arts. So I’ve got a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience

and I’m associated with some or the larger martial arts associations. I thought maybe by this time I could do my big tour of Australia and teach all the way around Australia – maybe as a tax deduction too, I’m not quite sure. Who knows? At the moment I’m still carrying on I think until the boys actually finish university which really now is probably in 2 years time because they are extended degrees. I think I’m

sort of stuck for the next two years but I’m certainly looking for something else.

That went for more than 10 minutes.

This I’m not quite sure of or whether I was told. I do remember glimpses of Ireland. I really was only

2 or maybe 3 years of age at that time. I have pictures of walking down the lanes in parts of Ireland there and the blackberries were on the sides of the road in big shrubs and eating those. Now, whether that was my family telling me later on I don’t quite know but certainly that seems very vivid. I certainly remember Glasgow there and the streets, the cobbled streets. It was wet all the time. It always seemed to

be as I said earlier – there seemed to be a lot of trauma, a lot of hardness, a lot of fighting as such. That was certainly a very working class area and a very depressed area. It was dirty because Glasgow was still the ship building at that time and the smog and everything was all over the place. The buildings were just coated in it. It’s dramatically changed since then. Certainly that depressed

attitude that was there I can remember that. I remember living in the big tenement houses, big flats, pokey little places and there’d be no lifts or anything you’d walk up the stairs, but just surviving in the streets more than anything else. I was only 6 or 7 at the time and we were out in the streets then. Coming to Australia I remember parts of it, visiting different ports that we came through – Aden for instance. I remember

glimpses of the activities on the ship on the way through. But really, probably, my real life starts in Salisbury in Brisbane at that time. And it was pretty traumatic. It was interesting because I hadn’t really realised what actually happened to me there until I went back to a reunion at Wilston School. I think it was the 25th reunion or something like that there. And a

group of us went back and I ran into a guy that was thein the same class as I was. And he sort of said, “Oh, Brotchie, I remember you. I remember the first day when you came to Wilston School”. And I said, “What?” He said, “Yeah. You stood up in the front of the class because the teacher asked you to. You said who you were and we couldn’t understand what you were saying. We got the impression very quickly that if anybody made any fun of you, you were going to take them out and punch them”. I said, “I didn’t do that did I?” “Oh yes, you certainly did”.

So, yes, it was getting off to a difficult start. Those are the sorts of things that I remember.

It was. I can understand the frustration of the refugees in the camps now and things like that as well. My father was interesting because things were run differently at that time. I remember in the camp he had to check in and check out of the camp. There were people on the doors.

And he said this was worse than concentration camps. Because in Ireland where they were working there were German prisoners who could virtually walk anywhere they wanted. As long as they sort of came home at night then who cares. And they went and worked places. These people were more bureaucrats and more policemen here than they were with the German prisoners. It was a bit weird.

Mum was interesting, really interesting. I’m not quite sure how she and Dad

really got on together. Mum actually worked in a large clothing factory. Dad was a relatively small Scotsman and she was taller than he was and a very attractive woman as well and Dad’s more like me so I’m not quite sure how come. But they met at that time and they had their group of

friends as well, her girlfriends. And I think Dad initially was interested in Mum’s girlfriend. I’m never quite sure of the story but certainly Aunty Mary I’m pretty well certain that was what it was. Because when Aunty Mary came visiting here I could see the sort of spark that was there. But the group of four at that time and they enjoyed life. And Mum was different. She was certainly the organiser and she was the person who

probably encouraged us to do things and get out there and Dad was the worker. That’s probably the easiest way of thinking about it. My Mum died about 15 years ago now and I was quite old even at that time when she actually died but it was actually the Christmas after she died that I missed her. It sounds weird. However, one of the things that she

had is that every Christmas she would give me a book. Now this was a first edition book of whatever major novel there was around at that time and you could not buy it in Australia. And the Christmas after she died I didn’t get a book and it was the first time in 20 years that I hadn’t got a book. Where she got these books from and how she did it I have no idea but I got a book before you could buy it – all interesting stuff.

And that’s the sort of woman she was as well – encouraging in slightly different ways.

A little Scotsman. I’m the tallest Brotchie in history although my two sons are certainly going to top me. When we went back to Scotland visiting, because my wife is actually from Yorkshire as well, so we had to visit her family and everybody there was

sort of surprised that a Brotchie could possibly be this height sort of thing because he’s certainly one of the smaller, darker ones. We came from the Orkney Islands there which was really invaded by the Vikings and people like that. Sort of the story is we’re also part Celt and part Pict, the old style, the original Scots – well, not Scots, they were Irish, the original people

of northern Scotland at that time. Looking at Dad you’d sort of understand that – a short, dark person there, not the tall red-haired highlander, he was really Irish. Yes, an interesting man because he was – and I told the joke at his funeral – he had the most beautiful handwriting you could

imagine . Copper plate handwriting, it was beautiful, right up until he died. He was uneducated because he had to leave and didn’t get any high school training. It ended at primary school because he came from a family of 7 boys and they just couldn’t afford to educate them so they’d do anything. He worked in a pawnbroker’s shop and he kept telling the story that he

had to have a big box behind the desk to be able to see over the top of the desk when people came in there. I can sort of understand that as well. But that’s certainly how short he was. The interesting thing about my father and a couple of his brothers is their hands were extremely strong. Once again, our family were cobblers and were working with their hands throughout our

history. We’ve got our history going back to 1770. We can’t go back any further than that but there’s not any written records at that time but it’s written back to 1770. Certainly many of them were people who were travelling around Scotland, the north of Scotland, working for themselves and working anywhere they wanted. So there’s obviously an independent spark in there – not wanting to work for other people, working very manually. But

also when you think about a skilled job as well – making shoes and repairing shoes and things like that which in that time was certainly not mass production or anything. So the family comes from that sort of background but I think that the whole point was that with the Depression in the early 1900s and things like that and the move to the cities and the employment there.

And of course Glasgow was certainly the place to go because it was so large regardless of all the social problems and the smog and all that. Dad would have loved to be an architect or a draftsman. This is really what he would have loved to be. However, it didn’t work out that way and I’m not quite sure why – whether it was no support from his father. I suspect that as well. He

wouldn’t actually tell us that. However, it’s interesting because his father also got married at the age of 82 to a much younger woman and the family fortune, which was not very much, disappeared at that time. He was a bit of a lad the old grandfather apparently. I don’t know whether he wanted his own life and his sons could go and do something

else but it certainly seemed to be that way. Go out there and earn your own life and your own living and don’t bother me any more sort of thing. I don’t know anything about his mother at all. There’s very little there. As a family we don’t tend to have much of a written tradition. I think my father sent – in the 50 years he was in Australia – I think he sent two letters back to his brother

in Scotland. Towards the end of his life he certainly did send a few more letters at that time because his brother was slowly dying over there in a nursing home. And we tended to write the letters for him. But he was certainly not very close to them. And the brothers – some stayed in Scotland, some went to South Africa, some went to Canada and some to Australia. So they

dispersed all over the world - so coming from the Orkneys to Glasgow to the rest of the world. There seemed to be a wanderlust in there and a change and wanting to do things like that and I think I’ve inherited something similar. Although I must admit I’ve stuck in Brisbane for a long time but I’ve pretty well toured the world as well but came back here. Dad was a hard worker, a very hard worker

and when he bought the land at The Grange it was at that time dirt roads. It was an old farm that had been chopped up with a block of land that sort of looked like that. We put a little cabin on one side here and then proceeded to cut out the ground to fill in the hole in the middle. And this was shale/stone. And I remember him going to work and doing his

work in the Nam factory and then come home at night time and be working with a pick or a shovel. You didn’t have bulldozers or anything like that and he couldn’t afford them anyway. He was chopping this stuff out to make a level area so eventually he could put a house in. I remember I visited the house a few years ago and noticing when you go underneath the house there’s a two metre

stone face there underneath the house – it was up on stilts. And you realise that he chopped out two metres of stone all the way through. It was about 10 metres wide. And you think, “My gosh. That really was hard physical work”. But he certainly did that. And he’s worked all his life. The interesting thing was although he was a plaster orderly in casualty he was very, very good at

it - once again maybe manual skills and a bit of an artist as well because Dad worked there until he was 65, theoretically almost two days before he was 65. Because when he was going to retire the hospital, or the doctors, decided to put on a party for him.

There were 250 people coming to the party. Now these were senior orthopaedic surgeons who had come through him at the very beginning. There were doctors going from any age anywhere and everywhere and they were all coming to this big party in the boardroom for him. And this is the respect he was actually held in because he actually was very, very good. In fact even the Courier Mail, actually the Sunday Mail, wrote up a page

article on him at that time. This is the plaster orderly in casualty. So they were having this enormous party for him and the bugger collapsed in casualty which is what is termed an aortic aneurism, a ballooning of the artery. This is the main artery from the heart down to the legs which started to swell up, a weakness in it.

Just by sheer luck he was in casualty actually working and got this extreme pain and collapsed and all the rest of it. If he’d have had that at home he’d be dead. So they had a look at him and found out what it was and said, “Whoa”. So the next problem was which of all these surgeons were going to operate on him. And I’m not joking, there were 5 volunteers. Luckily, one of the guys who’d done a lot of work in America had just recently come home from America because when they looked at

Dad there was something a bit unusual about the whole thing. How come it hadn’t burst and it should have burst. And it worked out that Dad had a horseshoe kidney - two kidneys with a link over the top. Maybe I’ve got it. Maybe it’s hereditary because it can be as well. This link was holding the whole thing together and they were worried about the fact that as soon as they opened it up it was going to pop but it didn’t. And this doctor in America had actually done some surgery on something very similar so it was just sheer coincidence.

They went in and put a graft in, a Dacron graft a nylon-type there, woven nylon, and of course it gets infiltrated by the material and up to the time of his death 22 years later it was still fantastic. No problem whatsoever. And basically that was the only thing he’d had wrong with him. Deafness certainly from the war and he wore glasses like I did so

we’ve got that little hereditary problem as well. He smoked for many years and then stopped because he started getting a few pains in the chest and then decided not to do it. He stopped just like that. He’d been smoking from a 12-year-old kid in Glasgow I think or something like that. A very small, very wiry man and as I said earlier with very powerful hands and arms on them possibly because of the work they did. I used to tell a story – we always thought he was very strong

but he said one of his brothers was even stronger. One of the things they loved doing was when they went to local fairs and there’d be the strong man of the fair doing tricks. And the strong man would get a horseshoe and bend the horseshoe and pass it around the crowd and his brother would bend it back and send it back to him or they’d bend nails. Try bending a nail. My Dad could do that

and tie it into a knot. It was extraordinary the power in their hands. And these were little tiny guys as well so they were a bit unusual in that way. He liked his Scotch. Well, he’s a Scotsman and he’s allowed to do that. Even up to his death he and I used to have a glass of scotch on a Saturday night and there’s a bit of a tradition there. He was not an alcoholic

it didn’t sort of go that far although a lot of Glasgow people certainly did. Money really was not an interest to him at all. He was a bit of a rebel without actually doing very much about it. He was also a bit of a bitter man as well. I’m not quite sure how true much of the story is but he joined the

British Expeditionary Forces at the very, very beginning of the war and they were sent over to France in the phoney war at that particular time there. Eventually he became a quartermaster sergeant major and he was also in charge of the physical education of the soldiers and stuff like this. He used to take them on 15 mile jogs backwards the bastard -

and this little tiny guy. However, they were in France his unit and they were there at Dunkirk – in fact they weren’t there at Dunkirk because they were part of the blocking force that was left there to stop the Germans coming through. The Germans never attacked that was the saving thing. But I always remember him saying that they were in France listening to Churchill saying that all the British soldiers had been pulled out of France through Dunkirk and they were still

there and everybody had forgotten about them. So it would appear to have been a fairly large – certainly not a battalion, bigger than that, almost a division – they marched south about 250 miles to Saint Nazaire, it took them 5 weeks to get there. And they were totally ignored by the British government who really were in a big panic because they thought the Germans were going to come over and they had 300,000 soldiers they had to do something with so they couldn’t care a

damn about these people who were left behind. So they got there and eventually they got evacuated from down south there at that time. It was just sheer luck that the Germans didn’t really fight them. They let them go with a bit of skirmishing. And I’ve researched parts of this myself so there are elements of truth in this – the British government were very, very worried because this group of men were close to mutiny by the time they came back having been abandoned.

They didn’t mind being the blocking force they thought militarily that was reasonable. However, to be just totally ignored was not on. The British government got wind of this and they were worried that a fully trained group of soldiers with their weapons who had not been defeated would arrive back in Britain with a defeated army already there. So in fact as they came back they dispersed them everywhere in the

Commonwealth. They broke them up. And Dad ended up in a big supply department dump in Northern Ireland, in Antrim. All his other friends got scattered everywhere in the world. They ended up in Singapore, Canada – you name it – Egypt, everywhere, broken up, because they believed that the British government were too scared to keep them together as one group. I can

understand that from a military point of view. That was part of Dad’s background as well because eventually when the war finished he didn’t want to stay there. And that wasn’t unusual because there were hundreds of thousands of ex-servicemen who felt exactly the same way. So as I said earlier, “pull the plug and let the bloody place sink” as far as he was concerned, “a new life somewhere else”. And he was really content with that. He certainly enjoyed

Australia and enjoyed the sun and the freedom and that was a big change. You can hear him talking about the difference between the smog and the dirt of Glasgow and the fresh air in Queensland and the sunshine. It must have been dramatic for somebody like him. And that was heaven and what else would you want as far as he was concerned. So he’d sort of come home I suppose or it was where he wanted to be. And just

living free and in the fresh air was what it was all about. Once he was here – they had to pay ten pounds to get here and that was about all the money they had in the world. He had to scrape together eventually to work to get seventy-five pounds to buy a block of land. Seventy-five pounds for the block of land at the Grange – I wonder how much it’s actually worth these days. It would be worth an absolute fortune. That was a

fortune then. And then had to build a house and get Housing Commission help for that sort of thing. He was basically a worker and he had a great deal of difficulty and I don’t think he even wanted to break out of that. But he certainly encouraged myself and I had a younger brother at that time, Thain – Thain actually died when he was 10. He was two years younger than me and he had Hodgkin’s Disease.

He lived for a while and then finally died. So I was the only son sort of left. I was encouraged to do different things. It was interesting that having gone into the cadets and also the CMF contemplated going to Duntroon which was really totally contrary to Dad’s experience with the army. And yet it wasn’t because he enjoyed his time in the army and what

happened there he just didn’t enjoy the political side of it and those ramifications and that rebellion. So he had no hassles if I wanted to go into the army but I certainly decided not to. I realise volunteering going to Vietnam must have scared the hell out of them and he’d know that more than Mum would I suppose as well - going back into a fighting situation no matter what it’s pretty scary stuff. But they actually put no objections

to it. I think they were happier that I went as part of a medical team. I remember when I came back from Vietnam one of the first things I did when I came back is – there was no debriefing or anything like that. We left Saigon and we went to Singapore. And we spent a day in Singapore, we landed in Brisbane and I got off the plane and about two hours later on I went to the Royal Brisbane Hospital to say hello to

friends and things like that and came home with Dad. And he had a real old 1964 Holden at that time. And he was driving it on the way home and it made a hell of a bang and I hit the floor. “What are you doing down there Iain?” “Well, in Vietnam you hit the floor. If there’s a loud bang you hit the floor”. It was really quite funny. We had a great joke about that coming back. He was a very quiet man. I don’t think he ever put his

arm around me - certainly I’m very different from that with my sons. No affection in that way whatsoever. I don’t, ever remember him saying anything supportive at all but it was always sort of there. He was proud of the things that I did but it certainly wasn’t very noticeable which once again was fairly

typical of the generation of men at that time. When he was here - he and his brothers had been in a group called the Boys Brigade in Scotland as one of the companies there which is actually based on the Presbyterian Church but it’s also semi military as well. That’s the background of it. And he was in that. When he came here to Brisbane he

eventually set up different Boys’ Brigade Companies here as well and he was the captain of those. I joined them. And although it had a church background to it the idea was to get the boys off the streets and doing things. So, yes, while we were in the company we were certainly getting bible bashed. That was part of the whole thing but we were doing other things.

For instance, Dad had made the first trampoline in Brisbane, a really big trampoline. He got people from the hospital to come in to teach us different things. There was a gentleman who came who was a fencer and in fact I’ve still got his French sword up there. He taught us fencing. Another guy by the name of Nurden Soriko was a runner, an athlete and Nurden came

in and taught us physical education. He was actually a radiographer and I worked with him in the Royal Brisbane Hospital eventually. There was a young chap, I don’t remember his name, who was a Golden Gloves Boxing Champion and he came and taught us boxing. Then eventually there was also a guy next door who joined the company as an officer who was an ex-soldier and who was also into unarmed combat. If you put it all together it sort of brings together

my, and Dad’s as well, my background in the martial arts. So I really started probably form the age of 12 at that time and carried it on ever since as an interest. And Dad’s always encouraged me in that as well. Being able to defend ourselves and fight and it gives you confidence certainly as well. It’s an interesting one. He enjoyed the Boys’ Brigade.

I think it was probably a bit of discipline and also being able to help people especially young boys at that time there once again in a very quiet way. So rather than going out for broke with money this seemed to be the way he channelled his energies more than anything else. When he retired Mum and he decided - the house at The Grange is a typical

Queenslander up on stilts and all that sort of stuff. They’re really back in style again right now. However, they were getting older and getting worried about having to go up and down stairs and things like that. So they decided to move down towards the coast and they built a low house on slab down at Kippa-Ring down at Redcliffe just a couple of kilometres off the beach there and enjoyed that. Mainly because with

Dad having this operation on this aneurism it was about 9 months until he was physically fit again. Also at that time we’d started to realise that Mum had also got cancer. It started off as breast cancer and sort of went from there and nothing actually stopped it. So that dragged on for nearly 10 years. So they sort of got old at that time. Dad was basically looking after Mum until the

last couple of days when she finally went into hospital. When Mum died 15 years ago Dad didn’t want to come and live with us. He was very proud of his grandsons but of course they’re two young noisy boisterous boys and you can only stand so much of that. So he loved being with them because when Mum died he came here every

weekend. I’d go and pick him up on the Friday night or the Saturday morning and he’d come here and he’d stay the weekend and I’d take him back on Sunday. So he had the weekend but the weekend was enough. It was just too much excitement, too much noise, and too much agitation. I want to go home quietly, you know. So he’d spend the rest of the week at his own house. However, he was touring around with all the pensioners. They used to come and pick them up and take them to respite centres. They’d go on tours.

One of the things that was lucky –my wife Eileen, her mother was and originally her father were down at Scarborough. And when Eileen’s Dad died Charlotte, her Mum, and my Dad – they were the two old grandparents so they used to go on bus tours and stuff like this as well. Charlotte finally went to Sydney and Dad was a bit lost and lonely at that time. But he loved

gardening and he used to – not a variety – but one of the things he did enjoy was little, tiny, cherry tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes and also a little, tiny, yellow teardrop tomato which is a non acid tomato - and I mean millions of them. Because having been at The Grange with shale you couldn’t grow a damn thing except maybe paw paw trees. And down at Kippa-Ring all of a sudden you had this

sandy loam soil and you put something in it and it just grows like wildfire. So he used to be growing these tomatoes and he’d take bucket loads down to the bank – anywhere he’d go he’d take a bucket load of tomatoes. And I’m not joking – bucket loads. He used to have them sitting on the fence posts and people walking past knew they were allowed to take whatever they wanted. The local leagues club down the road there, the person who was in charge of the kitchen found out and used to come up and get bucket loads of them as well.

He just turned them out by the thousands which was really extraordinary because he said that in Scotland he’d never been able to do anything like that and certainly not at The Grange. All of a sudden when he’s retired he can do some wonderful things like growing tomatoes. He never tried growing anything else, you know, if you’re good at one thing stick to it was basically his motto. Also it was a very good excuse for him to get out and talk to people once again. He loved walking and exercise.

Even when he was living at home for the 15 years he would go down to the local shopping centre for lunch every day which was about a kilometre there and a kilometre back. And even up to the age of 86 he’d do his walk every day. It used to get really dicey because we were wondering whether he’d find his way home and I must admit a couple of times he didn’t. The other funny thing is also a couple of times at 4 o clock in the morning he went for his lunch

in the middle of the night. And of course the police were wondering what this guy was doing at that time. That’s when we started to realise things were going a little bit funny. He never had a very good memory. Well, why would he bother because Mum had a fabulous memory? She remembered everything – upside down and back to front and it was only later on when she died that I appreciated that I should have got all the information from her because Dad was bloody useless.

He’d remember some things when you’d jog him but it was very hard to get anything out of him. Physically he was very good - and even in the nursing home we finally got him into because of the danger that he was to himself. Nobody would believe us that he was so bad. We kept getting him assessed. And he had a patter. He could talk to anybody, not a hassle at all.

He was always fantastic. But eventually somebody did the testing on him, the memory testing on him, and he’d gone from about a score of 25, to a score of 12 to a score of 3 over a period of about six months and they said, “Oh, he shouldn’t be at home.” So we finally got him into the nursing home and that was a really good time for him. It really suited him at that time.

He’d always never wanted to leave his house. Once again I think this is part of the fact that in Glasgow you didn’t have houses. You rented an apartment or a tenement block. Also in Australia he could build and actually own his own house, “Wow”. It doesn’t seem much to us but it was certainly very different then. So even though he knew he had to leave the Grange to go to Kippa-Ring he never wanted to do that but he did because of the

reasons. And then he sort of enjoyed the Kippa-Ring house as well because of the gardening side so he didn’t want to leave that either. We were very worried about this but as long as he kept saying, “No,” fair enough. Until one Sunday I took him home to Kippa-Ring after being here. And he said, “Where am I?” and I said, “Dad, this is your house, don’t you recognise it?” “No”. As soon as that happened I had no real

qualms then about trying to move him into a home but up until that time I’d said, “No”. He was in the home for about 3 months only. Actually he had a very good time in the home and he could wander around anywhere and everywhere because it was very secure. He talked to everybody and chatted everywhere. The little Scotsman with his little tartan bonnet on. Yes, he got on very well. He went

downhill, memory wise, very quickly in that 3 months. We didn’t sort of realise it quite so much. I visited him every week so I recognised it happening but my sons went once a month only and they didn’t. We always sort of thought he’d live for years. They’d say you could go in there with Alzheimer’s and it could be 5 years before you die. They were a bit shocked at the deterioration in a couple of months.

But even I was very shocked when I went to visit him at the weekend and he and I were wandering around the grounds. He didn’t know who I was but he was chatting away, perfectly all right and discussing anything and everything that was going on. Certainly not the latest news or anything like that but chattering perfectly OK on the Sunday. I dropped in to see him on the Tuesday. He was in bed asleep and they said he really hadn’t woken up today. “Oh” -

That’s a bit unusual because he was normally up first thing in the morning bright and cheerful. Eileen and I dropped in on the Thursday and he was comatose on the Thursday. And while we were standing there I sort of said to Eileen, “Has he stopped breathing?” “Yes,” “No, he’s stopped breathing for 2 minutes now.” Then he just died which was quite good in fact.

No dramas and that’s the way he would have wanted it as well. He just closed his eyes and drifted off at that time. And at least we were there as well. I was really sort of pleased about that because that was very different from my Mum. My Mum was in Redcliffe Hospital at the end. And because of the cancer that she had her lungs were

filling up with fluid so she had to be upright most of the time. So she was basically almost drowning to death and they kept capping it but it was a terminal thing. So she was sitting up. And we’d go down. And I had the night shift. I’d work during the day and then go down there and sit there during the night with her there. And I always remember - she seemed to be perfectly all right. We knew she was dying but not right at this minute. So finally my shift was finished and I went

home and by the time I’d driven the half hour home she’d died. And I was pissed off at her or with myself. I’m not quite sure which one it was. Why couldn’t it have happened a little bit earlier so I was at least there? So at least with Dad I felt much happier that we were there. He didn’t know who we were or anything like that. It was interesting to note that everything just shut down but what surprised me was the speed

of it. The nursing staff had sort of warned us of that but you really don’t think that from a walking, talking person within four days he just stopped. Overall, when I’d been talking to him over the last few years when he remembered or anything he seemed to be pretty happy with life. He didn’t seem to be all that worried about the fact that he hadn’t achieved

anything – loads of money or anything like that. That really wasn’t him at all. He seemed to have achieved in smaller ways. He liked hard work and he liked doing good work and that’s what he got his kicks from. And he didn’t really need anybody else to say you’ve done a good job. That was ostentatious I suppose from his point of view –

a quiet achiever in small ways.

No, not as far as I know, not at all. I vaguely roughly remember where it was – heading out towards the south side of town because of course

nowadays it has totally gone. It was a Second World War military camp at that time so it had barbed wire fences and all this sort of thing. It was like a Prisoner of War Camp basically but it was an ordinary military type one. They had these big huts on about 3 ft or 1 metre stumps. Wooden floors and some sort of hard masonite type walls. Parts of the roof were tin and the rest of it was actually tar paper

only. These were long – they must have been about 30 metres long by about 6 metres wide – this big thing. And you could imagine soldiers sleeping in there in there on their bunks, like rows of them. And the windows were just push out things and you’d prop them up with a piece of stuff. So when we were there they were just partitioned off and you had families in this little pokey area there and of course there was no running

water and no taps and things like this. There was a shower block. Washing machines of course, there was no such thing at all. You had copper tubs that you boiled your clothes in and I can remember the smell of that, the smell of boiling clothes. Even now I can still smell it. That was a woman’s work as well. The men were out and the women were doing that and that was hard work.

You don’t just throw a couple of things in the washing machine and press a button. To wash clothes took you half a day. And of course there was a big wringer to wring them out with. It was demanding work. It was very, very hard. There were no streets or anything like that in this. There were dirt roads and grass growing everywhere. A population of people from anywhere in Europe basically there so it was a very mixed bag of

people. There were certainly a lot of Italians and Greeks I remember and Maltese as well and a lot of people from Britain predominantly at that time.

We had no problems as far as I know and my Dad didn’t seem to think there were any problems either. The problems we had were with the Australians. We were the Refos [refugees] at that time or the

Dagos [new Australian] at that time. And I was one of them because I couldn’t speak English as such. It was Glaswegian Scotch and it was an extremely broad accent. No, with the gang we had at school we stuck together. And as far as I remember I had a good time in the camp mainly because it was a group of young kids together roaming around. It was out almost in the

bush as well and freedom and our parents let us do that sort of thing. You didn’t have to worry about paedophiles or anything like that. Nobody seemed to worry about that sort of stuff.

Yes, it certainly way.

Yes, everybody could. You just had to check in and out – a bureaucratic type of approach to things.

And you’d wonder why but that was just the way things were done at that course.

It had to be a step down because even in the tenements at that time I know there were hundreds of people in small pokey rooms and stuff like that but they were pretty comfortable. They’d have to be against the cold of

Glasgow. It was a hell of a shock. My parents were very shocked by it. But once again it was a transient thing there but it was very tough. I’ve since seen some of the other migrant camps that came 20 or 30 years later and they were very luxurious by comparison. These were old army barracks and temporary barracks as well. You know, you had to put somebody somewhere

which is why people got out of them fairly quickly but people wanted to anyway so they certainly put up with it. Talking to some of the friends afterwards nobody seemed to worry too much about that. They did realise it was just make do. The whole of Australia was like that.

You’ve got to realise that Brisbane was a big country town with two-storeys and three-storey buildings and things like that – it really was, surprisingly, up until the 1960s. The lord mayor at that time, Clem Jones, decided to sewerage Brisbane and bring it into the 20th Century. And that must have been a big undertaking they had to

borrow the money. I remember we were there we had this nice Queenslander house and of course the dunny, the outside toilet down there. And you’d really think about the men that had to come and swap over the bucket of stuff. If you think about jobs these days some of that stuff was extraordinary. But my family have never let me forget this – as a young

guy my Mum had actually boiled some silverside with onions and that sort of thing and then taken the silverside out. So there was just this sort of pot with greasy water and things like that and she said, “Go and throw it in the toilet”. So I did. I opened the door and threw it in. She actually meant, “In the toilet”. I’ve never been allowed to live that one down. I was her son. I did what I was told

specifically. When I was in Vietnam in fact my Mum sent me a letter saying that sewerage was coming through the Grange. This was in 68/69 in that sort of period there and could I lend them the money to get hooked up to the sewerage system and gently reminding me of my use of the outside toilet. I mean

even at that time it was still relatively primitive I suppose.

Army latrines. I don’t remember much about them at all. It was a concrete blockhouse at the end and you had to go out all the way down there and sit in a row. Basically an army latrine type of approach to things.

Little partitions and open at the

front. There was no privacy – not in the army. That’s all it was, just rows of them there.

No, no, not in those days – no unisex type stuff. I don’t know how they divided it off. Maybe there were two different sets. Maybe one was the officers’ group and the other the ordinary ranks - once again, very primitive stuff.

Once again military

showers, a block of showers. You walk in and there are about 6 showers all in one row. It’s like going to the beach or something like that these days but once again military showers. It was a transit camp basically, that’s all it was.

One room. Vague memories – I was only a kid thinking about it there –

one bed for Mum and Dad and the two boys we slept on the floor. It seemed to be in retrospect around about 3m by 3m. Most of the cooking was done communally outside in an under cover area there. So basically your room was just where you slept and put your stuff in it, that’s all. Once again, just adapted military type

accommodation.

Yes they did. You supplied your own and you did your own thing. I presume there must have been some swapping done and things like that but, no, it wasn’t provided at all. You bought your own food from the local shops and grocers and you cooked it that way.

I don’t remember, not there. However,

I do remember at The Grange when we finally moved there because this rock and shale and about two inches of top soil on the whole thing nothing grew except paw paw trees. There was beautiful drainage and by sheer luck we used to grow paw paw trees. I’m talking about massive paw paw trees that you could barely get your arms around and they’d be 4 or 5 metres tall. In as much as

in my bedroom there I could look out – this is where there are stumps underneath and then the bedroom – I could look out at the paw paws outside and then slowly the paw paw tree grew past my window. And I used to remember having fights with the flying foxes because I’d get my shanghai in the middle of the night. They’d come into the paw paws and I’d get my shanghai out of my window to chase them away because we had fabulous paw paws.

We didn’t do anything to them other than watering them. They just grew up. They must have been a special breed of paw paws. They were absolutely fantastic. And I remember having paw paws and orange juice on it for breakfast – not cereals or anything like that – so a fruit salad for breakfast every day at that time which was really very healthy when you think about it but it was also free as well. We seemed to have paw paws basically all the year around.

We had about six of the big paw paw trees down the side of the house.

We had some there. Mum and Dad – we basically didn’t live on Scots or English food here. I think one of the reasons for that of course

is you couldn’t buy that sort of stuff here. I do know that when Mum and Dad came here in 1949 there was still rationing in Scotland. You had rations so food was still not readily available at that time. And here the biggest impression was the plentiful supply of fresh vegetables and fresh fruit in particular and meat as well. It was almost unheard of. When you realised they’d gone through six years of war and then

three or four or five years after the war fresh fruit? No. So I think they swapped over to Australian food at that time very, very quickly basically because it was the only stuff available. And Mum used to never want stodgy food at Christmas time. She just couldn’t understand it with the heat of Christmas and things like that. No haggis or any of those

sort of things. I’d have to say I don’t really remember any Scottish food at all.

Running loose. I know it sounds ridiculous – remember we had twelve weeks on a ship on the way here confined as well and just talking to Mum and Dad about it – just the

sunshine. Coming from England and Scotland and places like that it was just openness. The camp was in light bush area which had been partially cleared I suppose with longish grass – typical Australian bush – and nothing around for miles and miles there. And to be able to go out and build cubby houses and

climb trees and go down the creek, just getting out and around. You’d come home from school at 3 o clock in the afternoon or whatever it was and just go until dark and then find your way home at that time. Freedom is probably what it was all about.

At Salisbury – two impressions –

us against them. And I can understand that now as well because obviously the turnover in the camps was pretty big and the people coming into the camps had a pretty rough time. So they obviously brought that into the schools as well – the resentment of the Australians and us coming in there and child stuff going on as well just between groups of gangs. You’re talking about seven or

eight year olds at primary school so pretty small stuff by comparison. I do remember a couple of more important things and this happened later at the Wilson Grange School. I spoke Glasgow Scots, very broad Scots, probably my level of written English – particularly we were taught to print, not flying writing so

much. However, my level of written English was far superior to the Australians there but I couldn’t do running writing because we hadn’t done that. So there were two sort of totally different approaches to writing. It caused a bit of a quandary as to what sort of level I was supposed to go into. My speaking level was at one sort of grade and my written level was another one and eventually they said, “Well, you’re going into the lower one”.

It didn’t seem to worry me much but I was basically almost the oldest child in my grade while I suppose there.

Yes – no – that was at Kedron High School. At the high school after finishing primary school because we only did four years at high school at that time. This was the time of big immigration, hundreds and thousands of

people coming and Brisbane expanding unbelievably and all the services like that. There was no high school in the Wilston Grange area at all so we had to go 8 kilometres to Kedron or almost 8 kilometres in the other direction to Mitchelton. And they’d built this brand new high school at Kedron but it was really basic. The buildings and all of that – no covered ways, nothing at all,

just basic buildings. And, yes, they had bulldozed a playing area which eventually was the size of a football field but it was bare. There was nothing on it not a blade of grass, nothing whatsoever. So the headmaster at that time said, “Yes, guys, as you come to school please pick up couch runners, grass runners every day and start planting them.” And we did. It was really quite extraordinary to do it.

And you basically did other small things like that helping to physically build the school because very little was actually provided other than the basic buildings itself. I remember in the manual arts classes that we had – I was in the academic area – they built some of the gymnastic equipment that we actually used in the school. The students actually built them in their

classes because there was no other way they would have got it.

Yes.

No. I don’t know how that started. It’s Hodgkin ’s disease, cancer of the blood is the best way of thinking about it, but also as a result of that you also get swollen lymph nodes,

basically the sewerage system of the body. So they would have appeared - swollen nodes in the neck and particularly under the arms and things like that. So I presume that would be the first place that you’d see these unusual things possibly thinking it was mumps or something like that to start with and then realising it wasn’t. He had chemotherapy and he also had radiation therapy at that time. This was in the very early days of the Queensland Radium Institute type of approach to things.

I believe it went into remission a couple of times although at that time I don’t think there was remission as such. It certainly slowed it down but eventually he died of it. My Mum was a bit proud of the fact - I know it sounds funny but a lot of the early cancer treatment was sort of practised on children like my brother because they had no other alternatives and they were trying

different things as well. I’m not saying a guinea pig or anything like that but desperation I suppose. Certainly it appears that treatments these days are far superior than at that time so remission and so forth is fairly common these days. He was 10 years old. Thain, T-H-A-I-N, was his name which was – when you look at the history of our family it is a very

common name throughout our family going back a couple of hundred years so a very Brotchie type of name.

It was depressing. He was a very bright young man and probably would have done very well at school if it hadn’t have happened but most of his time was spent in and out of hospitals

for the last few years in particular. When I realised that to take him to the hospital Mum had to take him down to the tram, which was nearly 3 kilometres away, and then from the tram, the tram that runs all the way into the Royal Brisbane Hospital which would have been about a hour trip and then all the way back home again and things like that, it was a lot of work. And he would have to go in I don’t know how many times a week for his

treatments and things like this. It must have been absolutely exhausting. I do remember Mum saying that afterwards it was so tiring just looking after him and the logistics of doing this sort of thing. However, there were a couple of funny things as well because Thain being very sick of course had to get all the little extras and special things and was treated slightly differently and all of this by

comparison with the older brother. One time it actually backfired because I used to get into trouble all the time – “Why are you teasing him?” “Why have you done this?” “But Mum I didn’t do any of this stuff.” “Yeah, yeah, yeah, OK.” And here I was sitting in the lounge reading a book and Thain was in the bedroom there yelling out about how his brother was hitting him and teasing him and all the rest of it and Mum looked down and saw me on the floor there and finally

caught on. It was little funny things like that – a play off. It wasn’t done in a bad way or anything like that.

Yes we did because the house was fairly small. There was a main bedroom and a small one at the back with the two boys in that one. Most of the time during the day Thain would be in Mum and Dad’s bed because the way they’d set it up there was a big window in front of it as well.

So if he was at home during the day sick he’d be in there and then at night time he’d move into our room at the back. It was a very comfortable house. It’s still there. It’s a very, very well built house as well. Even though it was built in the early ‘50s it was very, very well done. It’s been certainly renovated and made to look much more modern at the time.

I don’t remember because I don’t think it happened that suddenly because he was in and out and in hospital and out of hospital it’s not as though it happened one day. When you really look at it, it was probably over a three year period. Sometimes he’d be in hospital for 6 or 8 weeks at a time so the room was mine then. But I do remember that when it finally became mine I could get rid of the other bed

and I could change my bed into the middle of the room almost whereas we had it out to the side to give us some space in the middle. So I could rearrange the room and I do distinctly remember that. But that was also useful because at that time I’d actually started high school as well so I could actually have a desk in there. I’d have to admit I do remember thinking, “This is pretty good”. If Thain had

lived I’m not sure how we would have coped because there was basically only the two bedrooms in the house there.

No. Once again I think it was because it was such a long period. Thain was two years younger than me so he was in a different grade. So whether his

peers talked to him about it or not I don’t know. But my friends were two years older and little brothers they were nothing at all. Not very much was said. But I think because he was on and off school and in and out of hospital for such a long time he was almost a non person I suppose is the way of thinking about it. It’s not quite the same as he was at school the one day and then died the next day. That might have been different. He

missed out on so much schoolwork anyway so he really wasn’t part of the class or anything like that. It was different circumstances.

Yes. That happened in the hospital there and we had been expecting it. I was 12 years old at the time so I sort of understood what was going on. And you could see it happening. He was slowly wasting away as well.

I don’t know whether I was saying, “I wish it would happen”. It gets to that stage where you think nobody should be going through this sort of stuff. He couldn’t even roll over and he certainly couldn’t go to the toilet so he was really totally debilitated by then. And should anybody be forced to go through this sort of thing? I do remember when Mum and Dad

said it actually had happened I thought it was a relief and certainly for them. And that was true. It really tired them down a great deal and all their resources, any money we had was put into that, just the travelling and everything else as well. The hospital didn’t cost us anything because it was a free hospital system at that time and just as well because cancer treatment would have been an absolute

fortune in the medication so we would never have been able to afford it anyway. But just all the other stuff that had to go with it to look after him tied up virtually any money we had.

Leaving high school – no, we’ve got to go back a little bit earlier than that.

Half way through high school I got a motorbike. Because I was 17 and again this was one of the advantages of being kept back that little bit right from the very beginning. So on the 16th of May I was 17. I was

allowed to have a licence. I’d been working in BP Paints as a storeman and packer in the Christmas holidays and I’d also been working as a painter at the weekends to earn money and I’d put it all together and I’d bought myself a motor bike, a second hand motorbike. Actually Dad got it for me because it came from the son of the doctor, the medical

superintendent of the Royal Brisbane Hospital. His son had this one, a black one. It was called a Velocette, an old English type of one. It was dirty, filthy, full grease and it sort of went but it was mine. So I had a lot of fun cleaning it up and doing all of that and then I was able to ride it to school. I was the first person to have their own transport.

Up to that time it had been by bike – we used to use our bike to go to school. So, “Wow” I had a black jacket and I even had a crash helmet in those days as well, surprisingly, Mum insisted on that one and this black motorbike. By these days standard nothing much of a motorbike but it was pretty spectacular at that time. My good sort of time started around about then as well but I also had a

negative side too which really surprised me. Because I got the drivers licence, my motorbike licence at that time, and I could pass all the eye sight tests without wearing glasses. In the next six months my eyesight deteriorated dramatically until by the end of that year I was in fact wearing glasses. And I was wondering what the hell was happening to

me and it did happen during that time which was a very big shock when you couldn’t see the blackboard. What the heck is actually happening to me? And then of course having to own up to the need to wear glasses as well, “Oh, this is not macho stuff” or anything like that. In retrospect that was a very traumatic time for me and it sort of set me back a little bit. I thought

“Crikey, what’s actually happening here.” If it had happened over a longer space of time maybe but it happened relatively quickly. So when I actually finished high school – I actually had a good time, I enjoyed high school. We had dances I suppose and at high school we used to always go and do dancing every Wednesday afternoon, and this was ballroom dancing,

not quite the same as these days. But we all learned how to dance and we used to go to dances on Saturdays and Sundays, Saturday nights and things like that. We had a ball at the end of high school but it was nothing like all the razzamatazz these days, nothing as dramatic as that. But I do remember the dance and how the whole

class was graduating there. It seemed to be a very good time. Most of us weren’t regretting leaving at all. Life was different. It was much more exciting and what we were moving on too. I was concerned because I knew I wouldn’t be able to go to university because you had to pay to go to university at that time. I was concerned also that my eyesight was disappearing very quickly and what the hell else was going to go on.

At that time, because I’d been in the cadets as well, I was thinking possibly the army and now with the eyesight should I go into the army with eyesight like that. I know you can wear glasses in the army but once again is that going to be very sensible if you’re going to be in fighting situations there. So lots of things just happened.

At Kedron I think there is a Kentucky Fried Chicken place on the same place now. It used to be one of those big rambling sort of ballrooms like a big hall. Maybe originally it was some sort of progress hall or something like that. It was about a kilometre away from the school so it wasn’t actually held in the school.

And there were two professional dancers from Brisbane that used to come out and teach the dancing there. I know it sounds funny but we actually paid for the dancing on Wednesday afternoons after school and almost everybody turned up. This was the guys who were doing manual

arts classes and all that sort of stuff – they’d turn up to the dancing as well. There was no stigma attached to it at all. I think with ballroom dancing – well, you didn’t have supermarket malls and you didn’t have TV – dances on Friday and Saturday night were your only real entertainment and you knew that was going to happen as well. And this is where you met girls obviously so everybody went to the

dances and learned in the afternoon. We had the ballroom and we had the more modern dances as well. They wouldn’t teach us the jive. That was a little bit much because rock and roll was just coming in. However, that’s the interesting thing because we shocked everybody. At that time remember – you’re only young –

the sixties at that time was unbelievable the whole atmosphere - rock & roll, Elvis Presley. The world was changing and a lot of people in the older generation were shocked by it. We thought it was absolutely wonderful this whole new way of doing things. And we all turned up to the final dance there nicely dressed, relatively speaking, but with the most vivid fluorescent socks you could

imagine - Presley purple, lime green, brilliant yellow. And all the guys had these and nobody could tell until all of a sudden we went like that and hitched our trousers up and all of a sudden we had this row of garish socks. That was a shock to everybody there. We did break out at times.

Suits and ties and white shirts and all the rest of it, that’s what it was at that

time. It wasn’t dinner suits or anything like that. It was just sort of lounge suits and most of those were our fathers as well. I didn’t own a pair of long trousers at all and don’t forget there was no such thing as jeans as well at that time. At primary school I didn’t wear shoes at all, all the way through primary school. Nobody else did either. My mother was absolutely

shocked about this. Only poor people in Glasgow don’t wear shoes and of course you have to wear shoes. So I was always told to wear my shoes to school and once I’d get over the hill I’d take my shoes off and put them in my bag because I was too embarrassed because nobody wore shoes then. It sounds a bit funny these days. My feet were like leather – hard with calluses on the bottom. But that was the way everybody was. At high school, yes, we had to wear shoes at that

time but once again I wore shorts all the way through and I did not own a pair of trousers, long trousers, for dancing or anything else, until half way through high school when things changed a little bit and became a bit more formal. I never got my own. I had to wear my Dad’s and I was wearing his suit as well. He was working class so thing were pretty tight at that

time. There were other priorities I suppose. The things we take for granted these days just weren’t available at that time. For instance, I was a runner, a very good runner. And my distance as the 880, half a mile about 800 metres or so these days. So it was almost a long sprint but not a long distance – it was sort of in the middle there and that suited my build. And I was good.

I represented the High School in Brisbane and I was almost up at sort of State Championship level. But I couldn’t afford a pair of running shoes so I used to run in bare feet, not even sand shoes or anything like that. My family just couldn’t afford it. A pair of spikes, it wasn’t on at that time. Until once again it actually

happened in the final part of high school when there were inter-school championships at that time. And Dad presented me with a set of spikes. It didn’t improve me but I felt like somebody. Just going back to earlier on Dad didn’t praise you but he did little things like that so you knew. So getting running spikes in those days was pretty

extraordinary so it was really a very practical way of saying “go for it” as well.

They would have been expensive but I don’t know how expensive they would have been. I have to admit also that I cost them money in different ways like that – saving it in one way and spending it in something different. During that

period of time I was in archery, shooting bows. There was a company called The Grange Company of Archers down the road and I had joined that as a young guy using any sort of bows I could. And at that time also these new things called steel bows came out instead of the wooden ones. And one Christmas Mum and Dad gave me a steel bow. Now in the

equivalent now that would have been about $400 or $500 dollars. And at that time I was absolutely shocked that they did that because I had no expectations of it whatsoever. Unfortunately they bought the wrong one because they didn’t know any better at all and it was a ladies’ one but it was OK for a young guy. So although we did without things in some areas we

certainly had those little luxuries or little things like that which came out of the blue. As I said earlier the new first edition book happened for 20 odd years of my life so they gave me things in different ways.

Me, I can’t play anything and my wife and family don’t want me to sing either.

My father was a piper and in the army he was actually a piper at that time. When he left the army he never played the pipes again. My mother was a pianist and she used to play for the Boys Brigade and things like that so she certainly was a pianist. That skipped my generation there. We didn’t have a piano. The only piano that Mum could play was in the church so we couldn’t afford a piano.

I never seemed to have any interest in playing music although what was interesting was that even at high school we went to music appreciation classes. This was extra curricular once again. And I was astonished actually because I think we had a teacher who was interested in music and he would take us through opera. This was boys in the 1950s and 60s – Opera? But he used to also

tell us the story of the opera and the background to it and then explain the music as well. So ever since then I’ve always had this interest in opera and I suppose classical music as well, the understanding of it, and enjoyed it as well. But I loved the rock & roll too and certainly still enjoy that.

Fabulous! Absolutely fabulous!

It happened over a long period of time. It’s not as though it happened in one weekend. It was coming through on the radio slowly. All this American stuff and Johnny Ray and people like this and I certainly know the old generation were very shocked by it. Nowadays you wouldn’t think anything of it. But, yes, it just slowly came in. But the point was it was

part of a whole generation change as well. Life was exciting. I think people were starting to have money as well. The war years were finally finishing and it took them ten years after the war before they got away from that. I think my parents were also brought up with the austerity of the war and all of a sudden it wasn’t quite that any more. They could have a little bit more. I think it was also the

freedom as well. And when you really look at those 1960s - clothing changed, peoples’ attitudes changed, the world changed, rock & roll changed and it sort of went on. It was an extraordinary period of time by comparison with the war period. It was almost a flip side of the whole thing. But once again it didn’t happen overnight. It happened very slowly.

I can show you an example of it. When we went to high school we used to ride bikes to high school and you were very fit there. And the bicycles had handlebars. Now that’s not the handlebars you are used to, you’re used to these sort of handle bars. No, girls had those handle bars and boys had the other handlebars. However, certain movies came out and the rock & roll and you

had – Easy Rider was it? What’s the one about motorbikes with Marlon Brando and the others -

Easy Rider. Yes, OK. All of those came out. And I was really lucky – over near our place there was a big dump where people used to dump all their rubbish. And I was

wandering through that - it’s amazing what you pick up in the dump – and I came across the handle bars of an old motor bike there. So I stripped it down and took it over and put it on my bicycle and here you had these things. And the police stopped me about it. “What are you on about? What do you think you are? Do you think you’re American? This isn’t what a man does”. And yet nowadays the straight handlebars on any trail bike

or any bike at all is fairly standard. That actually stopped the police. They actually stopped us. “What are you on about?” That was the attitude. That was quite extraordinary. But that was what that whole thing was about then – breaking out of the past. It was very dramatically done. The music changed unbelievably and times were exciting. Yes, I

really enjoyed it.

Yes, at that time. In my final year at high school I went to under officer training and did very well at that and came out of it a student and an officer. The approach was made to me at that time that because of the level that I was

at would I think seriously about going to Duntroon. And, yes, I did which is fairly incongruous to me when my father really didn’t like the army and yet I’d been militarily trained I suppose as well. I never quite understood how he didn’t discourage me from cadets or anything at all. You know, two opposites once again but he never tried to stop me from doing any of it. Duntroon is

very prestigious by comparison with Portsea the alternative of it. You came out as an officer and very well educated and certainly the elite in the military forces and probably socially as well. They were certainly a very classy group down there. However, there were a lot of stories about Duntroon about the things that went

on and it was very similar to other military colleges say Sandhurst or particularly say West Point in America where the most ludicrous things were done to the new plebs or the new people that came in. You know, you sat there eating your dinner and when everybody finished their dinner if you hadn’t finished your dinner you picked it up and put it on the top of your head. That was to try and teach you to do everything exactly the same in the same time frame. The other

thing was you couldn’t pass a senior class man without asking permission to walk past them. It just went on – ludicrous type stuff. And later on, they called it bastardisation at that time – just the treatment, the bullying of the juniors. Now this is normal in many of these military academies through the world. It’s a historic thing. Beat them down to build them up is basically what it was all about.

However, certainly some of the stuff at Duntroon when it came out seemed to be well beyond that but fairly acceptable in that group at that time. It happened to them, why shouldn’t it happen to other people? It seemed to me very incongruous when you were trying to build elite military officers, it just didn’t seem to fit at all. And also I think partly the attitude at the time - that might have been OK in the

old days, we were a new generation and I knew very well that if anybody tried to do that there I would hit them. I would just not accept that rubbish from anybody whatsoever. And of course I knew that would get me into trouble straight away. So a rebellious streak from when we were talking about the music and everything else and breaking out of old traditional stuff – yes, all of that. And Duntroon was the epitome of old

tradition gone to extremes. I had no experience of any of that actually happening but it was fairly obvious that it was there. I believe there’s been an investigation since then into a lot of that and of course it’s been cleaned up and they have certainly a much more sensible and modern attitude. And the defence college these days is a brilliant establishment especially for a future. I think for me at that

time it wasn’t me. So the alternative was to go to Portsea which was the second level down but if you go there your chances of getting a career in the military are much less against the Duntroon people. Not so good. It was certainly a much more practical way of training by comparison with Duntroon so after a while I said, “I’m not so sure”. And don’t forget my eyesight was playing up as well so I morally had

to question whether a soldier wearing glasses is really going to be able to do a job or do you get killed easier because you can’t see. I didn’t know what was happening with my eyes at that time. It certainly stabilised since then and in actual fact it slightly improved over the next 50 odd years. So a lot of things were bucking against me going there but basically it really was the reputation of Duntroon.

Medicine. Once again your social life did it to you. I thought I was going to be a doctor. Once again my father was working in a hospital. You come out of the hospital system and you know it inside out and upside down. I probably would have done medicine. I wasn’t bright enough to get a scholarship. I was pretty good at certainly at primary school and all the way through high school until that last six months

and academically I dropped dramatically in that six months. My mid exams were really brilliant but my end ones not so good. I mean they were still fantastic but certainly couldn’t get me a scholarship into med school and I needed a scholarship and there were about 12 scholarships for the whole state and that’s it and I didn’t get one. My parents obviously couldn’t afford that so as a result of

that I had to look for another job. And Dad found out through working in the hospital that the X-ray department were looking for cadets in radiography – the next best thing - and you get paid for it as well and you get paid pretty good. So I applied for the job and went through the interview stage and got it with two other cadets as well.

So I was working in the hospital during the day as a cadet radiographer and studying part time at night three nights a week and being paid to do it too. A couple of interesting things that you might be interested in was the fact that in radiography – now we’re talking about the 1960s here – two of us were guys and one was a girl. And radiographers,

the females have always been paid equal pay with the men since the 1920s – extraordinary, always, and do the same work as well. It was almost unique in any job at all at that time. Even female doctors weren’t paid the same. And not only that the other thing was also that when I got there my first three bosses

were females. And in retrospect I sort of realised that that had a big influence on me as well. My senior staff were females. In the profession it was about 50/50 male and females, an equal split in equality. So I grew up with that and I didn’t know anything different and it was a big shock to me later on when I joined the public service and other places and saw the rubbish that went

on when a girl got married and they had to leave and resign and all this., “What are you talking about? Aren’t they just equal with everybody else?” That’s been a big influence on my life particularly having 3 female bosses right at the very beginning as well.

I have no idea, no. I have no idea at all. I presume it may have been to do with the fact that it’s a relatively limited

field and not many people went into that area at all. But I have no idea why it happened. From an industrial relations point of view it must have been quite extraordinary. The other unusual thing was that even in the 1960s we worked a 35-hour week only because of the radiation dangers which was possibly quite true at that time because you certainly were working with it but the danger really wasn’t as

obvious or as real because there were a lot of other things built around the limited hours of work and this sort of thing as well. It was a bit of a unique profession at the time. We even had four weeks annual leave as well from the radiation problems. Now, once again, four weeks annual leave was extraordinary in the 1960s. So it was sort of a gift

profession I suppose in that way.

The first six months is in a dark room – a black dark room – because you know nothing. You are straight out of high school and they can’t give you a patient. You don’t even know how to do anything so you’ve got to learn something first. So you’ve got to do all your anatomy and your theory and this sort of thing. And you’re absolutely totally useless there so what do you do? Stick them in the dark room.

It helped my eyesight no end at that time. You had to learn the processing side of things and that was the safest place to put you. But it also meant that you also learned how to not only take the films and do the patient side of things but also to handle the other side which was very useful when I went to Vietnam and I had to do everything like mixing the chemicals and doing all of that as well.

Yes, it was six months in an absolutely pitch black room. There were little safe lights, coloured lights, so it wouldn’t expose the film, but very, very dull so most of the time you were actually working with your hands by touch. And we processed the film for 3 minutes in the developer. I can time 3 minutes even today within 2 seconds. You knew it.

At that time you turned the clock for 3 minutes and it went as far as 3 minutes and that’s all it went. After a while when you were doing other things you would automatically walk over to the developer tank and put your hand on it and the alarm would go off. It’s sort of amazing how you’re conditioned I suppose.

It was pretty rough and ready. Once again I was very lucky because when I started the equipment was relatively old, World War II stuff. And Queensland was in the public hospital system run on a shoe string and new equipment – people had just got over the austerity of the war and new equipment and technology was just starting to

happen. But I was lucky to be in at the end of the old stuff because once again when I went to Vietnam I was horrified with the equipment that I was given there. If I had been trained on the new stuff I wouldn’t have been able to do the work in Vietnam. It was really very, very old equipment. I won’t say it was dangerous but certainly the equipment splayed radiation in every direction. You basically had an

X-ray machine and when an X-ray machine generates X-rays it goes in every direction. It’s not pointed in one direction. So you have to have a lead casing around it and you have a little hole so the X-rays you want come out of the hole. Then you have a cone that funnels it in because you don’t want it sprayed everywhere else as well. And then you sort of line it up if you want that or you want that part and it works basically like a

cone. That’s changed these days when they have light beams and lasers and all of this and you can actually change the shape you want. So instead of spraying radiation everywhere you can actually narrow it down to exactly whereas we had a cone sort of approach to things. In retrospect it was reasonably radiation dangerous in that way. Also, the films that we used were not as

sensitive as they are these days and of course nowadays they even moved beyond X-ray film to digital type of stuff. I’m not sure – the amount of radiation of what is used these days is about nearly 1/50,000th of what we used at that time. We used relatively high doses to do ordinary work and yet we thought that was pretty good then. So it certainly much better obviously

these days. X-rays – the traumatic X-rays were probably the ones that mainly interested me because much of my early training was in the casualty department at the Royal Brisbane. From an X-ray point of view trauma is a relatively simple X-ray by comparison with some of the more involved

procedures for stomach cancers or anything like that. Or if you were putting X-ray dye into somebody that’s more the senior people that did that stuff. The junior people started off with the blood and guts stuff approach. X-rays are really quite simple. You’ve got a thing called a cassette which is an aluminium container and you put a piece of X-ray film in it. You do that in the dark room in total blackness.

You don’t just put the film in because on either side of the film is what is called the fluorescent screen. So the X-rays don’t actually expose the film. The X-rays actually excite the screens, the screens glow and that exposes the film and that’s the way it’s done. But that’s all packaged inside the dark room. So you come up – if you’re going to X-ray a broken leg – you put the X-ray cassette underneath it – obviously the right shaped

cassette for the leg or the abdomen, wherever it happens to be. You position the X-ray machine over the top and you may have to angle it depending on what you’re looking for. You go a little bit further away to the actual machine itself and set the controls and the controls you had were basically 3. You had a voltage and it’s in KV [kilovolts], thousands of volts, so you were talking 60K [KV] which is 60,000 volts (so it’s not 240

volts it’s 60,000 – up to 100,000 volts). That gives you the energy, the penetration power. So if you were going through a finger you’d use low KV and if you were going through the spine or something you’d have to use high KV otherwise it wouldn’t go through. You had the milli-amperage which is the volume that you have and then how long are you going to expose this for as well. And most exposures even at that time were sort of up to maybe one

second. For a chest it would be much shorter than that. And the problem was of course that in one second somebody can move or breath at the wrong time so you get a blurred film. You were trying to use the shortest times as you can. These days of course the times are down in milliseconds but a 10th of a second or up to a second was not unusual for us and you’re talking about people in trauma with broken arms and

legs and just the shakes to start with. So at times even with the best of intentions you’d tell somebody to keep still and they can’t possibly keep still. So you’d have to put sand bags around them gently to put the pressure on and to hold the thing absolutely still so you get a nice stationery picture.

They are big brutes relatively speaking. You’ve got the X-ray tube, it’s like a valve. These days we have solid state stuff. But it’s an X-ray cylinder, very heavy glass, inside this electrical component and you put a very high voltage across them. By doing that you actually generate X-rays. So you had this glass

cylinder which was the guts of the whole machine. Then you had a container around the outside. It’s a steel container lined with lead as well. And also it had oil in it to try and absorb all the radiation because when you generate the X-ray it goes literally in every direction. And of course that’s not what you want. You only want a focused beam coming out of the end so you need to be able to absorb absolutely everything. So you’d have the head of your X-ray machine

about that size and about that round. It had two very large steel cables coming in, insulated cables, capable of 100,000 volts and that sort of stuff. So you’re talking pretty dangerous sort of stuff if you did it wrong as well. That would go to a transformer in the corner of the room. The transformer would be metre x metre x metre like those things you see on posts outsides. Those transformers would be

taking your electricity up to 100,000 to 150,000 volts. X-ray table – it was usually a wooden top but they’re plastic these days. Underneath the X-ray table you would have a tray so if you were doing peoples’ abdomens you could put the film in the tray and slide it underneath. If you were doing just an arm you’d put it underneath the arm. The table often was just a flat one or sometimes the

table you could actually tilt it in different directions and sometimes you could actually stand it up as well. To do chest X-rays you actually had a standing one so you had to be able to turn your X-ray tube around sideways as well to be able to point it in that direction to say do a chest X-ray. All of these things were done a little bit away from the control panel. And quite often your control panel would have lead glass because even when X-rays hit patients there is still scatter from the patients as well.

You try to narrow the scatter down because scatter causes fogging on the film and you’d like to get it as small as you possibly can but still cover the area you want. That was part of the art in X-ray as well to be able to narrow the beam down to the minimum size. The more you could do that the better picture and the sharper picture you actually had because the wider you had the more extraneous stuff there was. But that scatter also you would scatter theoretically around the room as well so you had to protect your

operator behind the control panel. When I went to Vietnam some of the equipment I had there was right back from the Dark Ages. It was older than anything I had ever seen at the Royal Brisbane Hospital and some of that was pretty ancient stuff as well. But it did the job. It was very robust type of equipment.

You take the cassette away and if you’re in a good situation on the wall of the X-ray room is what we call a Pass Box. You open the box, put the cassette into the box, close the door and somebody in the dark room on the other side opens the other door and takes it out. He prints a name on it for your patient and clips it all up on a plate and puts it in the chemicals. Then it goes in a developer for 3 minutes,

gets washed and goes into the fixer which sets it and then goes into a washing agent and then finally goes out into a dryer as well. Altogether it would really take about 20 minutes. However, once you’ve developed it and fixed it you can actually look at your picture straight away. Yes, I’ve got what I want, yes it’s stationery, yes it’s good and then wash it after that. So you can sort of see your picture manually in about

five minutes. These days of course we don’t have to worry about doing any of that sort of stuff you have machines to do it. So when they take it out they put it in a machine and it automatically goes through the machine and pops out the other end. These days we don’t even have the machines any more it is all digitalised so instead of putting a cassette underneath you actually put a detector underneath which is hooked up to a computer. So when the X-rays go through they virtually do the same thing on a

detector and all of a sudden you’ve got a picture on the TV screen, the monitor. They’re much more sensitive and much quicker as well so you can almost get instantaneous pictures. That means also that once you’ve got that digitalised like that you can send that anywhere in the world just like that. So the beauty of that is if you’ve got something you don’t understand you could send it to a specialist in the United States in two or three

seconds and they could look exactly at what you’re looking at. So things have come a long way since the manual days.

Three years. That was unusual actually because the cadets the year before me actually finished at junior. That was half way through high school. We had junior and senior and they finished at junior and they did a two-year training course. We wee the first group to go to senior and do a three-year

training course as well. So we worked during the day and we did lectures at night-time. At that time our training was by the Radiographers’ Association. The AIR, the Australian Institute of Radiographers. They ran the course I suppose like the Accounting Institute these days and that sort of thing. They got guest lecturers in to teach us anatomy and physics as well and all the

things on the way through. We did anatomy at the medical school and the physicists from the Queensland Radium Institute would teach us all about physics and radiation and all that sort of thing. So they’d have a whole series of speakers and most of the people did it voluntarily as well. It was only many years later that finally - there were only 3 of us for Brisbane at the time in that one year only 3. Later on there were 8 or

10 people per year and of course now you’re talking about 30, 40 or 50 so it really got out of that amateurish thing. Over 20 years ago now the whole thing swapped to the QIT or the QUT these days. And even at that time people were still working during the day and going to the QUT at night-time. That’s changed now. They actually go straight from high school to the QUT and do their

preliminary two years there doing all the theory and practising on models and doing all this sort of stuff. And then they have to do a one-year professional.

Gods you mean? It basically was. Remember at that time nurses used to wear

veils. This is the nursing sisters, they had veils. I thought the military was bad but nursing was even worse. Even nursing you had student nurses and the student nurses were 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th year and then they became Sisters. The hierarchy was unbelievable because you had the nurses’ quarters and they lived in and they had to be in at certain

times of the night and it was like a boarding school type of approach. We used to get into trouble because we’d go out to parties and things like that and when it comes to 10 o clock you had to get all the nurses back to the quarters. It was weird because if they weren’t in until 10 o clock they had to stay out all night and I never understood that one. Talk about dragons – nurses’ quarters were unbelievable at that time. That was once again part of the ethos of the whole thing and

that’s changed now and there’s very few nurses that every live inside a hospital any more. But the doctors were the top, the gods, well educated and obviously very intelligent people as well. They were very good at their job. And the nursing staff were sort of below them. And predominantly in a hospital, whether we like it or not, that’s the two groups, the two main influence groups, especially in those

days. Since then of course you’ve had the other professions start to come in – the radiographers, the physios, the occupational therapists and the dieticians and other professional groups have come in are once again well educated and doing their own thing. So nowadays you don’t have the same hierarchal power things that you did have 30 or 40 years ago.

Nowadays it really is more of a team effort and you do work in groups. A lot of that also is I think the attitude of the doctors has certainly changed to being normal people and that’s been recognised by the medical profession. Nowadays you can’t go and do medicine straight away. You’ve got to do another degree first and then you’ve got to basically apply to do medicine because to be perfectly honest

most of the bright, intelligent people did medicine and were lousy doctors. They weren’t doctors as such. They would prefer to do medicine with no patients but they were very bright and intelligent people and that sort of came through. Nowadays doctors are much more people-oriented and still bright and intelligent as well. So that sort of hierarchical culture is still there in the hospital because whether you like it or

not the doctor probably eventually really has the final say, the final responsibility of co-ordinating everybody else and putting together all their expertise and their results. Somebody is almost going to get sued so somebody has to take the responsibility and regardless of what we think it often is the doctor that that comes down to.

Relatively little at that time. You were a technician and you were there to do a particular job and do it as good as you can and as quickly as you can and then pass it on to the doctor straight away. And that was fairly understandable as well. That’s an interesting question you asked because it’s also – I now know it means that as a

radiographer you really almost were not part of the medical team. You did your own job and then moved on to the next person. So often you never saw that patient again at all and you saw the leg only and you didn’t even realise if it was a male or female let alone who they were and you never saw them whereas the doctors and nurses tend to be much more involved with the person. It certainly meant also that as a result of that your job was the leg and the best X-ray

you could get of that – the perfect definition, the right position, everything. So your feedback of how you did your job was the actual film itself not the patient getting healed, that was months away. And the patient almost became a disembodied thing by comparison. So the immediate feedback in say about 10 minutes of how good you were at your job was how good that X-ray was at the far end.

Immediate feedback - it tends to change your focus a little bit and unfortunately it tends to change it away from the patient and to the equipment and everything else. I noticed this very much when I changed to Prince Charles Hospital, a cardiac chest hospital. At that time your patients came back again and again and again and sometimes you’d see the same patient 20 times over

a period of years. They’d become a patient all of a sudden and it wasn’t just an X-ray of a chest or whatever it happens to be. And I really noticed the difference between that particularly if you were doing children for cardiac defects. And you had something to do with them when they were 12 months and 5 years later you’re X-raying them as a grown child and you saw the growth in them as a person during that time.

It’s very different from somebody on a Friday night in a car accident who you never saw again.

Initially we started off in trauma and we were stating on very simple things, broken fingers, and moving through that. And as you got more experience – because let’s be honest, the doctors and nurses they are the main

job there you are just providing a particular service and information for them to be able to do their job. So your job was speed and accuracy and getting it to them and that’s really what it was all about. And of course they totally appreciated that exactly happening. If you gave them a lousy film their job is much harder so accuracy is what it is all about. You start off with the very small stuff and you then move up to helping with very serious traumatic cases, you know, car accidents and

things like that where maybe you can’t even move the patient or they’re trying to do other things to the patient while you’re trying to X-ray them at the same time. And of course sometimes you’ve got 5 or 6 things broken as well. And you’re moving from a fractured skull to the shoulder to the spine to the pelvis – especially the motor bike accidents – so it becomes very much more complicated but once again it’s still relatively simple work. Once you’ve gained the experience of being able to do

that then you start to move on into the more complicated procedures. How do you X-ray people for kidney stones? By giving them an X-ray dye and then X-raying the kidneys as the dye gets excreted by the kidneys and you can see what happens there. If somebody has an ulcer giving the barium a white yucky type of plaster type stuff that you drink. And then when you X-ray it and you can see the inside of the stomach or it can be the opposite end if you want to

do the valve for bowel cancer there. So you had those sort of opaque media and then you got even more complicated to take an example of neuro-surgery. If somebody comes in with a ruptured blood vessel in their head what they do is they put a needle into their neck, into the artery, and you pump X-ray dye up into the head to outline the arteries of the head. How long does that take?

Half a second. And you’ve got to get a series of pictures taken during that time. Maybe they’ve got a brain cancer and you’re trying to X-ray the blood vessels that are supplying the blood to the cancer itself and once the blood with the dye in it has gone into the cancer it tends to blush. It gets a slightly different colour to it for a fraction of a second. You’ve got to be able to time that

exactly right so that then the doctor can see the picture and he knows exactly what the cancer is and where it is wherever it happens to be. And then you have other angiograms like the Prince Charles Hospital where you are feeding a catheter into the heart, into the coronary artery, putting the dye in. But your heart is still beating, you can’t tell them to stop, and you’re trying to do that and you’re trying to find the blockages in the arteries themselves so the surgeon can go in and do a

bypass on it. You’ve got young children with heart defects so the blood is flushing from one side of the heart to the other because there’s a hole in the heart and you put dye in there to show what the hole is and where it is. You have some children where the heart is reversed. There are lots of different ones. But most of those X-rays are using some sort of opaque media. That’s always very dicey because the opaque media

also had a potential to have allergic reactions from rashes to in fact death as well because some people were very, very sensitive to it. It was an iodine based compound. Luckily these days we can do less and less of that because of the ultrasound MR [MRI – magnetic resonance imaging] scanning and things like this have been able to take over and do some of these

things which in the past we did in a pretty rough way.

Once again a combination of things – no one thing. I was in the CMF. Many of my colleagues in the CMF at that time also volunteered to go to Vietnam at that time so then you swapped from the

CMF into the regular army. The adventure there. Look, I’ll be perfectly honest I was thinking of doing exactly the same thing. I’d been through the Canungra training courses and as a CMF I was fairly well trained there, pretty good in fact. So the potential was to go there and adventure and all that sort of thing. A young guy – yes, I possibly would have ended up going. I was pretty close to doing it. However I

heard about the medical team and thought well first of all it’s less dangerous. It’s in the same sort of area and I can go fairly quickly as well without doing anything else. So I said “OK,” and went and volunteered to join the medical team. A lot of it was adventure – going off to war in a relatively safe way I suppose.

About four months I think because we were actually members – we had to sort of go through medicals. We were associated with the Department of External Affairs and I presume there might have been some security clearance or something like that. We had to get passports because we actually got official passports – OF19777 – that’s not bad going. So, yes,

an official passport. So there was that sort of procedural stuff there. It seemed to be relatively quick and I think getting some of the nursing staff and others was a bit of a hassle. I think it was about 4 months.

A fair amount in as much as having been in the CMF and having been trained by warrant officers who had

actually come back from Vietnam I was under no allusions as to what it was really like. And I knew about the political side of things as well but I certainly knew about the military side, yes.

How horrible it was. Can we stop for a second?

The instructors who came back were often warrant officers. We didn’t see the officers but the warrant officers but some of the stories they told were quite extraordinary. These were non-commissioned officers and they were very experienced soldiers there and they’d be in advisory roles because the team was advisory really to start with. But when you talk about advisory roles in fact they were running

companies and running battalions and running everything and sometimes in the most horrendous circumstances as well. But they did a fantastic job. They were very often working with either Vietnamese battalions or possibly up in the highlands with the Montagnards and maybe with non-mercenaries and things like this. And also often totally by themselves and isolated. We ran into a few of these

when we were in Vietnam as well. But these guys came back and this was them brought back to recuperate and stuff so they would sit down at night time and tell us what it was like and the real problems associated with lack of logistics and the fact that the troops weren’t trained and the language difficulties. All the problems with fighting the Viet Cong and their ambushes and their tactics and

the booby traps and everything like this that they did. So when we were doing training with these guys some of their training was very realistic so you could learn a lot from them. But none of them were sort of gung ho in trying to get anybody to go there. They were really professional soldiers. It was their job and as far as they were concerned the best experience they could ever have to do their job. But the casualties were pretty high as well. Not so much

dead but certainly wounded because most of these guys like Payne, the VC [Victoria Cross] winner, and things like this they were pretty hairy stuff and with no support in many cases. So talking to them was really very interesting in that way but for a group of young guys it was pretty exciting stuff as well so many people did volunteer to join

up.

In sort of two ways. At least by having some of the training, particularly the CMF training, you could sort of see what was happening. I was a bit horrified at the

Americans. You know, you hear the stories about how they conduct warfare and it’s absolutely true. And you think I just don’t believe what goes on. A couple of times we went for breaks down to Vung Tau and we’d drive down which realistically was ridiculous because it was right through the middle of enemy territory. So if so you used to sort of borrow a few sub machine guns at the same time. What we’d do I’m not quite so sure

you’d just drive like hell I suppose on the way through. I was more concerned - on a couple of occasions a couple of compounds near us got hit during the night by small raiding teams and I realised that if they came into our building you’d just have to have one person one of them at the end of the corridor and nobody could move or if anybody walked into the corridor they were

dead. It was just a straight corridor running for 30 metres with all these things coming off it. So from a military point of view we were pretty hairy. Also, being a 3-storey building, it was going to obviously take for observation and for other direct things as well. So you could understand those sort of things. I got a little involved. And this is one of the things I was going to say earlier

on. We had some of these warrant officers. They were up in the hills. One young guy, he was 22 years of age, a young Australian guy and he came down to us and said, “Can you teach us how to do surgery?” A 22 year old soldier. And we said, “Why?” And he says, “I’ve got nothing. I’m up there with hill tribes and

Montagnard company and any wounded I have to treat and there is nothing we can do to help them and I need to do anything”. So our doctors said, “Well come on in”. And he sat in on the basic operations and what to do and they talked to him as well because there was absolutely nothing there. And you think this is a 22 year old guy quite happy to cope with this sort of thing. He said when he first arrived there on the

first night he had had a bit of a villa as his headquarters. And he’d been told previously, “OK here’s the bedroom and that sort of thing” And he automatically moved to another room. That night a satchel charge blew out the door, blew out the whole wall of where he was supposed to be sleeping. He said, “They knew where I was going to be sleeping”. And he said, “It just goes on like that all the time”. So he recognised that a lot of the team around him were also VC sympathisers. And he was the only Australian in that

whole thing there at 22 years of age. And what it raised with us was a bit of an issue with him but also with some of the American Special Forces teams, the A Teams, and they were up on the border. So you’d have about a dozen of them in a compound there and there’ll probably have two or three companies or mercenaries or Montagnards or whatever it happens to be to use them as a raiding/blocking force

up here. Now the hassle that these guys had the same as the Australians was if your people get wounded what do you do with them? You can’t send them to a Vietnamese hospital, a military hospital, because they wouldn’t accept them. You can’t send them to an American MASH unit because they’re not Americans. What do you do with these hill tribesmen who are the lowest of the low basically around the place? Very good fighters but not socially acceptable at all

so we ended up with them. And we had quite a few of them and they got them to us in a variety of ways usually trucking them three days later. The American Special Forces were a little different they actually had access to helicopters so they would chopper their people down. And anything at all we could do for them they were very grateful because they were just going to do it was as simple as that.

So as a result of that we actually went visiting up there as well and it was an eye-opener to see what it was like on the real front line there when you realise that the Viet Cong are just 400 metres over there – no maybes – they are actually there. They would actually stand up and wave at you as well if you were there. “Don’t fire because if I fire you fire and we all get killed,” but of course they do. But a little while after the

base, the group that we were associated with mainly they were OK but about 20 miles north of them there was another base and soon after we’d been there they actually got overrun. It was the first time that the North Vietnamese had actually used tanks, light weight tanks, and it freaked everybody out. They’d somehow or other brought the tanks down through the Ho Chi Minh trail and in through Cambodia and assaulted the camp with tanks. Nobody even dreamed that that could possibly

happen. And as far as I know the A Team at that one actually got wiped out. Not only did we treat the wounded in those places as well one of the more unusual things, and we did this for the Australian groups as well, the hill tribesmen are a very insular group, they are also very much interbred as well and there’s a lot of genetic defects among them in particular

cleft palates. It just seemed to be one of those things, which are of course very disfiguring. If anybody can do anything to make a cleft palate look reasonably respectable they are over the moon. And we did, our doctors really did quite a few of those. Nothing to the extent that we could do here in Australia but we did have people coming in with no upper lip. Their nose and mouth all just one big hole, this big gaping thing.

You could actually see into the sinuses as well and it was really grotesque. So it was pretty rough surgery just pulling it all back together and they’d almost have a face which was often better than some of the wounded had anyway. But often if you did this the families in the area were so thankful to the soldiers, the special teams, and this was their way of gaining support from the local people too. And there were other things along similar sort of

lines. So in that way they were actually civilians, the support, and it was a way of helping too and helping the soldiers as well.

It was very simple. It was pretty easy as far as I was concerned

because for the first three months it was just really getting passports and doing medicals and getting inoculated and all that routine stuff there. And I had no idea who else was on the team at all. I’ll be honest I think the team came together really at the end. They sort of scraped everybody together. Because the first time we really met as a team was at the Health Minister, Knox at that

time, had a lunch for us, a dinner. And that was the first time that we’d actually met the other people. And then we started to realise that we’d actually come from lots of different places and there were only two people that I actually even recognised from the Royal Brisbane Hospital. And Judy Hogan, the senior nurse, was one of those. But when you think of the staff at the Royal Brisbane – I don’t know how many staff there were but there were thousands of them scattered everywhere so

it wasn’t that hard not to see them. And then Doctor Sale came from Rockhampton and other places as well. There was no team building, no build-up, no nothing. We met at that time and look, I’ll be honest, mainly at that time so Sir William Knox as he was later could get his picture taken doing all the nice politician type stuff. That really was what it was. But he was nice and he was

very supportive as well. And then we sort of disappeared for a week and then the next time we met was at the airport and flew out. That was fabulous. We flew out on Qantas, first class. I even sent the menus, we had printed menus, I sent them home and I just recently found them. My Mum actually kept them - Lobster Mornay and anything else you wanted. The only time I’ve ever been

first class on an airline. It was absolutely fabulous. We didn’t even realise that most of the team was actually on the plane because we were stuck in different places. And when we got off in Singapore we had two days in Singapore to get acclimatised. Really that was the next step on the way through and we were in the same hotel so we finally sort of realised we were together. We just thought we were in groups of threes or

fours and then we realised there were about 8 of us together. So we did the usually touristy things and Raffles and all this sort of stuff in Singapore and got to know each other a little bit better there. Then we hopped on another plane to take us into Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon which of course was a bit of a hairy ride because you fly in very high and then virtually go down as quickly as you

can wondering if people are going to take a pot shot at you on the way down. And the biggest impression I got was you got off the plane there, you opened the door and it was hot as hell. It even put Brisbane to shame. You walk into the hangar which was basically all it really was at the time and there were what seemed like millions of people there and all Vietnamese of course and all talking and you couldn’t understand a word they were saying

and you had no idea where you were going. Luckily the one person who had gone ahead of us was the team administrator and nobody knew him at all and even today I still don’t know where he actually came from. Bill came the other way and said, “hello” and he had organised everything at that time. We then piled on to a Kombi Mini Bus and a couple of other bits and pieces and started

straight out of the airport and then went into the suburbs of Saigon. In the suburbs there was a villa. I don’t know what Saigon was like 60 or 70 years ago but it must have been one of the most beautiful cities in the world – obviously very French. And these villas of that time must have been magnificent. Now they were plaster peeling off

them and overgrown and everything else but even inside it was still pretty spectacular stuff. And that was sort of a hostel for the Australian teams in Vietnam and a few other aid people and stuff like this. We could go there at almost any time so if you went to Saigon for the weekend or whenever you had a break you could actually stay there in that area and you had a bed and food and everything supplied. So we got there

virtually as a bit of a break and then from there they bussed us once again up to Bien Hoa on the way through up the main highway – two lanes of bitumen made by the Americans. It was about the only bitumen part in the whole place because between Saigon and Bien Hoa and Long Bin there was this beautiful highway and then it stopped from then on. It was an interesting trip on the way up and

such a very different country. It was flat with paddy fields everywhere stretching on either side. Of course when you first arrive there you are absolutely terrified that somebody is going to take a shot at you in the first ten minutes. It didn’t happen but you’re always very aware of it particularly when you realise that you can’t walk on the footpaths. The footpaths are covered in barbed wire because they’ve got to keep people away from the houses or the shops

otherwise they throw grenades in. And people were walking on the street in the middle of the traffic which was predominantly little motorbikes more than anything else or the pedi-cars. And of course it was all absolutely chaotic. They drove on the wrong side of the road as well. Our cars were all Australian cars except for the American jeep so our steering wheel was on the wrong side for them. They followed

French rules which I’m sure was absolutely no rules whatsoever. I came across roundabouts for the first time ever in my life and didn’t know what the hell was going on in a roundabout. The bigger you are and the noisier you are and the more power you have you barge your way through is basically what it is except for one rule. It’s really interesting if you want to cross the street you put your hand up and the traffic actually stops. I was quite amazed at that. And you walk across

and you can walk straight through the middle – it was really quite extraordinary - and then all chaos once again. You’d get the impression there were no lanes, left or right lanes and you either go in one direction or the other it didn’t really matter where you were on the whole thing. And the second impression I had was all these beautiful girls because with the Ao-Dai, the Vietnamese traditional dress they were always perched on the back

of the little motorbikes, side-saddle, because they were too decorous to go any other way. And with the silk flowing out the back it was an absolutely beautiful sight. They were extraordinary. And you had the young girls dressed elegantly like that and then you’d turn around and you’d see one of the older peasant women or workers there with her black gear on and a straw feet and bare feet and what an absolute

contrast from somebody who is probably only 30 years of age and worn out like hell and then you have these other astonishingly beautiful young girls as well. The contrast was dramatic. We arrived at the compound and wondered what the hell had hit us but the rooms were good. We had individual rooms – a bed, a ceiling fan which went for 365 days I never turned it off, a

cupboard. We had luxury – actually each room had an ensuite. It was a toilet and a little shower and a wash hand basin and it was quite adequate. The most beautiful thing about Vietnam is all the toilets are up on pedestals. You just have the ordinary toilet but it is also raised up off the ground so you’re sort of sitting up a little bit higher except of course if you squat on one of the other toilets

but the European ones are always up on this little pedestal. I never got used to that, being at that height. The accommodation was perfectly adequate – a little bachelor flat. And there were just rows and rows on the floor that we were actually in. The top floor had a dining room and there was a kitchen at the back there. We had Vietnamese people cooking for us.

Some interesting food came out of that and their version of western food was interesting as well. In front of that there was a very large lounge area with wicker tables and chairs and very comfortable stuff and leading outside so you could actually go outside onto the roof there. Of course the most important thing was on the top left hand side – the bar. You did a lot of drinking in Vietnam.

I have never got over the price of booze in Vietnam. We had American PX [American canteen unit] rights, Postal Exchange, basically a discount supermarket – you could buy anything at the PX. You would go in there and you’d look around and you’d have bottles of Bacardi [rum], anything you wanted, scotch or anything else and they weren’t just ordinary bottles, they were big bottles, and it would be something like US$4 [United States currency]

for a full-size bottle of any sort. Courvoisier –anything you wanted was in there at dirt cheap prices. You could go to the catalogue and you could buy a Mustang car and have it shipped to the United States to your specifications for US$3,000. And the Americans did, they did exactly that. You couldn’t have the car there but you could have it somewhere else. Anything and everything you could buy, you could buy it in the PX.

It was quite extraordinary. It was very useful for me because I was working with two male nurses in the X-ray area who did some X-ray work as well and part of our job was to actually train them so that we could hand over to them afterwards. The both spoke French, almost no English. They tried to teach me Vietnamese and I tried to teach them English and we just had a good time mainly.

These guys were really nice. They were older than I was probably at that time late 30s. And they were really nice and one of the ways you could sort of say thank you was a bottle of Courvoisier or a carton of cigarettes. I didn’t smoke – sorry, that’s not true. I took up smoking cigars in Vietnam - they were so cheap - I don’t

quite know why but I did but no cigarettes. But you could hand them a carton of cigarettes which cost me US$1.20 for a carton. And of course they could go and sell that on the black market for an awful lot more than that for themselves. Courvoisier being French cognac they certainly appreciated that. And once again once a month you’d give them something like that. They never asked for it and I don’t think they really expected it.

Yes they were by the hospital. Look, for South Vietnamese civilian public servants like that it’s almost negligible. And we quickly realised that their salaries were a pittance by comparison with anybody else. And yet these guys worked hard as well and nobody ever said anything about giving them anything like that but it seemed to be the natural thing to do.

They were a bit embarrassed about it as well so you don’t go up obviously to do it. They’ve got their desk and it suddenly just appears on their desk for them and things like that. Towards the end of my tour they’d invite you round to their house which was always a very dicey one – not so much from my point of view – I was very concerned about them having a round-eye going into their house and how that would look to the neighbours and the Viet Cong as well – fraternising.

So we never asked to go to anybody’s place but on occasions they’d invite you around and you’d have some interesting meals. At other times you’d go out to some of the local restaurants there. I’m saying restaurants, I’m not quite sure that’s the term – eating establishments – mainly to try out some of the Vietnamese food which mainly is

really very, very nice. And sometimes you’re not quite sure what they’re giving you – soup with this red stuff in it – blood. Or they’d go to a restaurant and of course you’re the guest of honour so they’d give you the delicacy, the roasted head of a chicken. So you’ve got to pick it up in your chopsticks and bite the brains, you don’t eat the beak. Of course they did it quite

deliberately as well. No matter what anybody says about the Orientals they have a wicked sense of humour and an absolutely great one as well especially once they got to know you a little bit. They would tease like hell as well. I really enjoyed my time with them. The hardest thing I ever found was to find a barber. At that

time I was dark and I didn’t have a beard and I had relatively long hair. Don’t forget it’s the 1960s – Elvis Presley type stuff – slicked back. And I rode a motorbike too so I had to have all that type of stuff. Where do you go to get your hair cut? And then when you get there how do you tell them what you want done when they don’t speak a word of English and my French was pretty lousy as well. That was very interesting but it was really sort of

quite – they cut your hair but there were also a few extras like trimming the hairs in your nostrils and pulling the hairs out of your ears and lots of other little things. “Wow! What’s going on here?” And you were always worried when you were sort of wrapped up in warm towels – is somebody going to come in like Al Capone and slit your throat! That was interesting trying to find a

barber once a month. Once again it was the equivalent of about 40 cents these days and you were on the table for nearly an hour but it was almost luxury at that time. And when you went in there the whole neighbourhood seemed to come around to see this guy. Being Australians we wore shorts and long socks there. So you’d be lying there and all of a sudden you’d feel the little kids coming in and

pulling the hairs on your legs because it absolutely fascinated them. And the kids were little toe rags – they were wonderful, just like kids everywhere, joyful little brutes.

Yes - actually in two ways. We’d get paid a salary which

I can’t remember –I think it was about $4,000 for the twelve months which was a pretty good salary and no tax. And that made a big difference. And that was paid into my account here in Australia. It was around about that amount. But we also got paid an allowance while we were in Vietnam as well, a daily allowance. And this was actually paid in MPC, Military Payment Certificates, which were the equivalent of a US Dollar. We could use that in the

PX and we could use it in other places there but you couldn’t actually use it in the town. So if you wanted to go down town or anything like that you had to get money given to you. So you’d hand over your MPC and you’d get piastas and go down town and buy the local stuff there. And I actually found that I could live comfortably on my daily allowance, really very comfortably at that time, and even save money up.

I got to the other end and we couldn’t bring it away. And I don’t know how much I had but I had a wad of money. And when the next guy came in I said, “Here’s 400 bucks, I can’t spend it. I can’t do anything with it”.

No. It was supposed to be an allowance and you’d just get caught out at the far end. But certainly Ron who came before me did the same thing to

me. He walked in the door and said, “Here’s some money to keep you going before your money comes through”. It looked exactly like monopoly money, exactly the same, “This is real?” And you did tend to treat it exactly – it wasn’t real money – especially when you went to the PX and other places you could buy all these things for it - quite unreal living. And it’s so cheap.

It wasn’t money at all.

What they did to us we did to them in twelve months time. “You’ve arrived – good – we’re going,” but we actually didn’t disappear. That was exactly what happened. We arrived on the doorstep and we dumped our stuff in

there and we went down to say, “hello”. Within half an hour we were working there straight away because as soon as we walked in the door they said, “This and this and this and this and this – I’m off to a party”. They had two days of parties lined up before they left. There was a 48 hour overlap. I never saw the other radiographer again in all that period of time except when I literally ran over him in the corridor there.

No, they had parties and that and we did the same at the other end. We had going away parties with different people and with the local staff and all this sort of thing. Yes, it was “dump in the deep end”. I know some of our doctors were actually in the operating theatre within an hour of arriving in the hospital with the other doctors who very quickly said, “It’s all yours,” and walked out the door.

They were scared of the hospital anyway. You come to the hospital to die. It’s a last resort. And that’s their whole ethos because you’d have children brought in with dysentery and things like this, gastro, dehydrated to hell, all cupped [?] (Chinese medicine). And it’s not doing them any

good and they’re just like limp rags. They’d have to do cut downs onto the veins to try and give them drips and things like this. Many of them didn’t make it because they were so late in coming. So it’s a self-fulfilling prophesy – if you’re sick and you go to the hospital your chances of dying are pretty high. Yes, but you were basically going to die anyway. Also so many of our -

we tended to treat car accidents or motor accidents because we had the main highway running straight past our door, so it was that sort of civilian trauma. A ten tonne truck and a little motor scooter – what’s the motor scooter going to look like? So they don’t come in with little tiny cuts. It is very seldom I ever saw any sort of minor injury at all. They just didn’t bother. They went to their local little doctors or something like this or just didn’t do anything at all.

When you got something it was pretty bad even the civilian stuff - the same with mortars and stuff like that and the guns. I remember one woman that I X-rayed there and she had this turban type bandage all over her head. They said, “We don’t know what’s wrong with her but X-ray her first”. And that was the system we actually had. When anything ever happened at the

hospital I’d be the first one to go down and then the doctors would sort of follow on from then on because you’d go in and you’d look around and you’d go and X-ray whatever you thought needed to be X-rayed. It’s not like here in Australia and another country where the doctor sees the patient and then he orders the X-ray. You didn’t bother with that rubbish at all. So I X-rayed this woman and, “Wow! What the hell is this?’ Now I don’t know if you know a

50 calibre machine-gun. The actual round itself is about that size and sticking out of her head or sort of half in and half out of her head. This big damn thing like that and here she is sitting there with a big toothless grin with beetlenut and all the rest of it with this big bullet stuck straight into her head. In fact it was really quite simple they just pulled it out. It had just pushed everything aside so it must have been almost spent by the time it hit

her otherwise it should have blown her head off altogether. But it was that sort of thing we had. A young boy came in who looked really sick but not very much wrong with him apart all these little tiny perforations all over his legs. His bones are perfectly all right so, “what happened?” “His water buffalo stood on a mine”. So you X-ray his legs and see all the bones of the

water buffalo in his legs. Because that’s what happened. He was sitting on the water buffalo with his legs apart like this and, “Bang!” perforated with hundreds of bits of bone off the water buffalo. And you had to go through and get them all out. Often the shrapnel didn’t look very much. You’d see a small hole in a patient and you’d know there had to be steel in them somewhere so you actually had to go

X-raying and you had to try and find where it had ended up. And at times it was extraordinary the distance that that sort of things had happened and the things that it had gone through to get there. And that’s what the doctor really wanted to know, “What the hell do I have to patch up?”

No I had not, no. However, having worked in an accident department it was very good practice for the same sort of thing

because so many of our were that sort of thing anyway. For instance, I remember one time we arrived down there and we had patients everywhere. And it all looked weird because they were short. We had a group of workers, 30 workers, in the back of a truck going to work. It went over a big mine. The truck went upwards about 2 metres and you’re standing in the back of the truck and

you don’t have any lower legs any more. Your ankles are on your knees and just pulverised there. And that sort of thing often happened with mine injuries. It was just “Pow” and you don’t just break them it’s like jelly at the end. I always had consternation for our doctors because theoretically you should amputate that because it’s just a mass of pulp. But they do realise in that

society with one leg it’s very difficult to work particularly with field work and paddy work and things like that. So when you take somebody’s leg off it’s a very big consideration. A lot of trauma was that. It was war trauma but it was really no different from a car accident – somebody on a motorbike, getting your lower leg smashed on a motor bike. So a lot of it was exactly that. The gunshot wounds and those other ones in fact were

relatively simple because we often the gunshot wounds go through and they go through an arm and all of a sudden you’ve got that much bone missing in there but there’s no bullet any more it’s gone out the other side. I’d done enough with foreign bodies in Australia but it was really more the trauma to the body and how it was done really wasn’t quite so relevant.

A lot of the other ones in the truck – if they weren’t standing in the truck they were sitting in the truck and of course their spine crushed like that so you’d actually have 2 or 3 crushed vertebrae as well.

Very stoic people who sat there with this blank look on their face and didn’t say boo at all – extraordinary. I do know a lot of the military or

the Montagnards had been given morphine and stuff like that. You understood that. However, the ordinary civilians who came in had none of that at all. With the children – no crying, no nothing – they’d just sit there and take it which absolutely threw us because until you’ve actually X-rayed them and think “Sugar” you would swear there is nothing wrong with them. You don’t unwrap the bandages or anything like that – you know there’s something with their leg and then all of a sudden you realise there’s a

two-inch gap in their leg. And they’re sitting there looking at you and sometimes even smiling at you and they must be in extraordinary pain. That was really very noticeable. Even the children didn’t cry. When somebody died they were extremely upset and distraught like anybody should be and the parents were exactly the same. The parents were more worried than the child was sort of thing. They certainly had the emotions

but they were certainly very stoic about the pain and noticeably so.

Yes. Well it had to be even more so in the hospital. You had about 250 odd beds altogether in the hospital there and 12 Vietnamese nurses and 6 of our nurses. What do you do?

It’s very different from here. In Vietnam, yes, there were cooks and people who cooked the food. How do you get the food into the patients if they can’t do it themselves? Well, sometimes it didn’t happen at all. You actually needed your family and they were wandering in and out all the time. They slept under the beds and sometimes they were on the bed and the patient was under the bed because it was cooler on the tiled floor. As much as

possible around each patient and each bed was a family. Now this changed all the time. People came in and out and they cleaned them and they washed them. We very quickly caught on that you taught the family how to change the dressings. You couldn’t get a nurse to do it because they were too damn busy doing the real work. How to do things - you explained it to the family and the family looked after them. Those people who didn’t have families really suffered a great deal. You tried to help them in other ways but they just

didn’t have that intensity there. But it was certainly very, very obvious.

Well all the usual ones that everybody had – kidney stones, gall bladder problems. There were so many skin diseases – parasites. That was probably the most horrible one I can imagine because almost everybody has

worms. And you think about getting worms from dogs and things but these are pretty vicious brutes. And often during surgery what happens is the worms can actually eat through the bowel. So you’ve got a bowel full of faeces and the worm eats a hole through so the faeces can actually leak out into the abdomen and cause infections. So the surgeons would go in to clean up all the mess and of course find the worm. And you’re talking about a tape worm

which could be something like a metre long like a piece of tape. And to see these things wriggling around inside someone’s stomach or in their abdomen or in the bowel and knowing that so many – because of the pure hygiene and the partially cooked food and all this sort of thing and you realise, “Oh gosh” there’s a lot of that there. Leprosy was the one - I had never seen

anything like that at all. To see the leper colony and it’s exactly what you hear about. Hands and feet and fingers and ears just rotted off. Our surgeons often used to amputate some of the ones that were very bad and causing problems because they can catch something on something because they have no feeling at all. And just to see the disfigurement

from that. Tuberculosis was very rife in the whole place. Certainly we had compulsory chest X-rays to try to knock tuberculosis in Australia but I’d take chest X-rays and you’d have big holes in their lungs – half a lung eaten away and the other half filled up with fluid and stuff like this. It was traumatic.

A third world country in the middle of a war and no money to spend on hygiene and you’ve also got a rural population as well living physically in paddy fields. They’d use human faeces as fertiliser so stuff gets recycled. It hasn’t changed very much in that way over there. There was a very low level of hygiene particularly in the countryside and of course in Vietnam the majority of the population were

farmers in the countryside. Certainly not in the cities as parts of the cities were extremely elegant and modern and very French with everything you’d expect there. But the country was slowly running down and getting tired.

Yes. We’d been warned about it and we knew all about it but it was not the same as actually seeing it. And our medical doctors

by comparison with the surgeons said some of the stuff there they just had no idea what was going on at all. A lot of it was complications – they’d come in with three or four different things that would just complicate things dramatically. There was plague as well. The black plague – episodes of that as well in isolated

areas there. I don’t know so much about the medical side really because being in X-ray I was more onto the trauma side of things but certainly all the usual gall bladder stuff and barium meals for ulcers. They got ulcers like everybody else gets ulcers and bowel enemas because they had colonic cancer and stuff like that. You

often got people coming in with very advanced sores – enormous ulcers eating into their flesh. They had cancer that was so far gone. This was half he problem of course because you’d virtually come to the hospital as a last resort and often it was very late because they tried to rely on their own traditional medicine most of the time. That was probably the

most disappointing thing on the way through was trying to break through that reserve and distrust and lack of confidence and trying to get them to come earlier.

I don’t think we did, no. And the previous team said the same thing as well. It’s very much a traditional thing and self-reliance as well.

They are a very traditional group. Don’t forget we were really dealing with the ordinary worker and we were certainly not dealing with the high class Vietnamese. They would be going to French doctors and the private clinics. We were dealing with people who were dirt poor and very superstitious as well but who times were extremely grateful for

what help they could get. But they were very suspicious as well. I can’t blame them but it would have been nicer for it to be different.

Some of it was that our doctors were men. It was very difficult for the woman to be

examined by a male doctor and of course the husbands were a bit suspicious of that as well. The reverse happened too. The male patients didn’t like being treated by a female nurse and a lot of it was just to do with the lack of language. You couldn’t quite explain to them what you were trying to do. We did have interpreters but you were wondering what was actually being said at times because

it’s bad enough trying to talk medical terminology with somebody who can speak English but when you’re talking to a field peasant who has no idea of this stuff and you’re going through an interpreter as well you really wonder what they’re actually being told. They sort of look at you as well. I can’t say I ever saw any straight out hostility. No, that’s not true on a couple of occasions there were where people absolutely

refused to have things done. Once again you wonder what was actually explained to them, how it was explained. One of the biggest hassles I said earlier we had was this thing about amputations and it took us a while to totally appreciate that it’s very, very hard on that agrarian, rural type of workforce. You virtually had

condemned them if they didn’t have a leg to do things with and even arms and things like that as well. The interesting thing was they still came. People did come to the hospital and lots of them. I did about 15,000 patients in my twelve months and I’m not quite sure but I think when Dr Sale did a comparison that was just a couple of thousand less than Rockhampton Hospital did

in the same period of time. So we had a lot of work coming through. Much of our work was really mass production and a lot of it was to get people through the original traumatic stage. And you did the best you could. None of it was fancy and there was relatively little follow-up surgery at all. It was literally clean them up, stitch them up, put them together and goodbye and move on to the

next one there. People in the town certainly came back again for other visits but often many of your patients came from out of town and you just never saw them again. So did they die? Did they get better? You really didn’t know. The main thing we thought was the fact that they knew we were staffing the hospital and yet they still came even if it was at 2 o clock in the morning as a last

resort. And if they did come at 2 o clock in the morning and ran the curfew and all the rest of it then we went down as well because they were brave enough to do that.

I had 6 of them right next door to me, within 2 metres of me, they were my patients as well. There weren’t that many captured VC but when they did come in there was actually a

ward compound there right next to the X-ray department. Some of their injuries were really quite horrendous.

I’ve got a slide there – some of the things that must have happened to these guys – you were treating them for one thing, a gunshot wound, and you realised they’d had previous things happened to them.

We had one guy who was walking with a limp and just out of curiosity I X-rayed his hip. He had two hip joints. He had his ordinary hip joint and a bit further down he’d obviously been shot and it had broken his hip. It had broken his actual leg and it had formed another joint there. And he’d been out in the bush for two years and he had this wobbly leg and this is the main bone in his leg.

They had very little help out there from their own surgeons. We knew many of the people in the town had to be Viet Cong sympathisers. The statistics said that would happen. However, it would appear that there weren’t as high numbers as people actually thought there were and that became very obvious in the Tet offensive.

The VC really did think the whole thing would fall to them especially in the big towns. And it just didn’t happen. I think the local people really didn’t want either – get rid of the French, get rid of the Americans, get rid of the VC and let us live. They weren’t pro American or South Vietnamese, they weren’t pro VC – we want to live our lives please, everybody leave us alone. They would have loved to have that there. And at

times they were obviously coerced into helping the VC as porters of information and most of time it was coercion in one way or another. There had to be sympathisers as well, yes.

Talking to the staff who would tell you

about different patients there. And after a while you sometimes picked up on how come everybody is fussing around this one person sitting there and nobody is sitting near them? Everyone knew who they were. And you’d say, “VC”. “Oh, OK”. They almost knew the sympathisers. Maybe they said something I don’t know but you could almost see that little bit of

isolation that was actually happening. We also had the reverse as well. We had patients come in who were known VC or very strong sympathisers who had been executed by hit squads, yes,

and maybe it didn’t work. We didn’t know it at the time but the Americans actually had a program called the Phoenix Program. And this was not to hit the military VC [Viet Cong] this was to attack the political infrastructure in the towns, the support, the political commissars and things like that. And they hired goon squads which could have been South Vietnamese or could have been mercenaries. I’m not saying the Americans themselves

did it, it was sort of several layers underneath that. But basically they would go into known sympathiser houses and execute somebody or shoot them or, like the IRA [Irish Republican Army] did, shoot them through the knees. It happened on both sides because we certainly got a lot of civilians brought in who’d been punished by the VC in similar sorts of ways because they didn’t co-operate

as well. To be honest it made no difference as far as we were concerned. We were there to help the Vietnamese people whether they were active VC or not it really didn’t matter a damn. The Viet Cong prisoners I had next door I was always worried about once they got well what was going to happen to them. You know, get them well enough so we can execute them because they actually went off to South Vietnamese gaols. Or maybe they returned and became Chu Hoi

and I don’t really know whatever happened to those guys at all. But that didn’t really matter. The only time I was really scared was when I X-rayed somebody and they actually still had a grenade in their pocket and this sort of thing and it sort of slipped through. And you thought, “Sugar”. At least they didn’t pull the thing. Little things like that did happen. You’d sort of be X-raying someone on a stretcher and realise there was a pistol stuck underneath their bum.

“Oh, where did that come from.” They’d sort of hidden it there. I was never threatened by anybody and we sort of got the impression that they treated us relatively neutrally from both sides. Nobody ever threatened us, not openly anyway, there. We had a charmed life because we would go down in the middle of the

night and from our compound nobody ever took any sniper shots at us as far as I know. A couple of times we had to go on the main highway, yes, but that was basically them taking a couple of pot shots at anything that drove down the highway. We kept saying that the kangaroo and the red cross on the side of our little vehicle saved us. I’m not quite sure that’s true.

I think they sort of left us alone. We were sort of neutrally treating both sides. If there’d been any political issue I don’t think the Viet Cong would have had any problems executing us. They’d be bloody-minded enough to do that if it suited themselves but I don’t think they did. Whether they decided not to because they’d get the townsfolk off side so it’s better to do that. Whether they recognised that we were providing a service that they couldn’t

provide so they could actually say, “Well, we’re letting them stay there,” so they are still the good side as well. You never know the story. And, yes, one of our very senior Vietnamese nurses would appear to be a very high cadre in the VC as well. Whether that had any affect on the whole place I don’t know.

This was later when I came back to Australia. I got friendly with quite a few of the nurses there but two in particular – Cuci, Cocuk - and she was a really pretty little girl and she’s still in Vietnam back there. And Nuet - they were short and tall. One tall and slim and a sort of dumpy little one there as well. They were sort of

almost like sisters. I don’t know how old but probably roughly the same age as myself. So we got friendly with both of them. They could speak a little bit of English as well and Nuet eventually came out. She got married after we had left and she came out and she got on a refugee boat and ended up in Melbourne. And I didn’t know anything

about that at all until all of a sudden one day I got a letter from her. So we’ve seen them a few times since then and a couple of times they’ve come up and stayed here. So we’ve been piecing together some of the stories that happened afterwards. And she was the one that said, “Remember Nurse so and so?” And I said, “Yes, I sort of remember”. “Well, she’s the Deputy Provincial Governor”. “What?”

“You’re joking”. “Oh yes”. Such is life.

That’s right.

Yes we did, mainly begging for supplies. That was one of the biggest problems that we had when we first arrived and I learned a big lesson from

this one because the South Vietnamese gave us nothing, they had nothing to give us. Think about X-ray film and chemicals, that was my background. But X-ray film is expensive stuff, the size of the thing. And they just didn’t have anything and certainly not in the amounts we wanted to use as well. So we used to go to the MASH unit at Long Bin there and beg, scrape and borrow

anything we could get at all. I must admit a lot of their surgeons and doctors came to the hospital to see the other side of the story. They’d certainly see the American wounded but they didn’t see the disease side or anything else. And once again, they are doctors, they’re interested and it’s a big learning experience. They gave a lot of help to us. One of the units there also built us a new ward as well very similar to the Foreign Legion who

built the hospital in the first place. But it was really very interesting because I learned a logistical thing from this. Yes, I had friends over there and I’d go over and they’d give them to me and that sort of thing. Of course I needed something to trade – blonde nurses were pretty good. Blonde round-eye nurses you could get

anything you wanted as soon as you mentioned that. In fact, any nurse and any colour it made no difference whatsoever. “We’re having a party”, “Yes” “Are there nurses?” “Yes”. Just to talk to a female opened doors to say the least and we made no bones about it as well and the girls certainly were happy about the whole thing too.

There was a lot of socialising in that way. I think all of our nurses were single nurses as well and meeting new guys who happened to be American military well, “So”, so they had a good time. What I had done is I had set up personal relationships with guys over there to get supplies which seemed to be sensible as they had plenty of them. I went away on

leave for a week and in the week things ran out and all of a sudden nobody had them. And the two Vietnamese radiographers were doing the X-rays at that time while I was gone and no supplies they were running out. And I came back and Dr Stave the head doctor was talking to me and I was explaining my way of getting supplies and I said

“But I can get everything I want”. And he said, “That’s the point, you can get everything you want. What happens when you’re not here? Can you set up some sort of a system where we get it automatically in some other way because you were getting it.” So I actually had to go through the USA [United States of America] program and other places to try and get a more regular supply of supplies. We eventually in fact did the same thing with the

rest of the hospital which is not as easy as it sounds because we were a Vietnamese civilian hospital and some of their supplies really weren’t designated for that. But we actually set up systems so there was a regular supply of medication and drugs and parts and things like this. And I learned a lot from that, that you really do need a system and not a personal system. You need some sort of system going on otherwise you’re

really not doing your job well because you walk out of the door and everything falls apart. And I certainly learned that from that exercise.

Exactly what do you call military personnel?

No. Americans went to their own MASH’s to their own units there. Predominantly the South Vietnamese had their South Vietnamese military hospitals there.

No, I can’t say we did either of those there. However, we certainly did the mercenaries and the Montagnards and some of the Nongs and a lot of the hill tribes as well. There were Cambodian mercenaries fighting with the Americans up there and they couldn’t go to any other place. They were non people. They were soldiers, military certainly, but they didn’t have there own hospitals or anything at all so we got

those ones that came on. And it tended to be because of who they were and where they came from that they were a little bit isolated from the rest of the population with no family to help them. Particularly the Americans, the special forces, were very appreciative of any help they could get because these were there men who would otherwise die.

That was the only military that we actually treated other than the Viet Cong of course. They were soldiers I suppose.

Not very much at all. They used to come up and service our vehicles for us and keep them running. That was very vital. We certainly went down visiting as well to Nui Dat and also to Vung Tau down there.

Originally we went down really to look at their facilities and get some ideas from there because you were always trying to do something different or better. We tended to socialise with them a little but the thing was we were in Bien Hoa and they had the province down around - quite a long way away so we weren’t in the local area. You actually had to

drive through or chopper through to get to them. Originally the Australians were actually in Bien Hoa. When the Australians originally went in they went in to actually guard the base. And you could see that because when you looked around the different areas there were Australian bars with Kangaroos on them and things like this. So you realised there’d been Australians around but since then they’d

done the deal with the Americans – we don’t want to be mixed with you we want our own province. We want to run our own area totally so they’d moved out. If they’d been closer to us I presume we would have had more to do with them but having that distance away from them, no. It was interesting to visit them down there and to see the camp. I was always impressed by the fact that if

you went to the Australian camp if you were Vietnamese you didn’t get in the door at all no matter who you where while you got the impression at the American Air Base that anybody could walk in and out of the door at any time they wanted. It was a sort of free for all sort of thing. There was certainly a different degree of military discipline down there and much tighter. They did help us on occasions especially when something would break down and we had to call on somebody.

I know that the Australians came up and ran telephone wires from the hospital to our quarters so that at night time – that’s the most extraordinary thing in Vietnam. You look at the lamp posts up there and there are millions of wires. And you know that 9 out of 10 of them do nothing. If anything goes wrong you put a new one up because you can’t find the wire that’s broken. It was just festooned with them.

I know they came and did things like that for us there but there was relatively little contact with the Australian military.

Letters and I used to send parcels home as well with things I picked up and vases as I showed you and other knick knacks. The town had beautiful pottery as well so I sort of packed some of that

stuff up. And I was sending slide photographs home there. I did tapes, audio tapes – cassettes were just coming in at that particular time but Mum and Dad didn’t have that they had a tape machine. There was no telephone contact at all. I do know that when the doctors went back after their 3-month tour with

us, back to the hospital, most of them went and said hello to Dad and, “How’s he going?” And, “What’s happening” there. But that was the only contact.

Tet - an interesting time. That gown I have over there is my Tet gown because Tet is a celebration, it’s New Year, and that’s exactly what happened. And the local Province Chief was having a big party on the Governor’s grounds. And they are there and invited lots of the military and civilians and everything to this enormous party which was fascinating because

they had a chess game going. And the chess game was almost like this board here, it was about the same size, with human chess pieces – children all dressed up. This was Chinese Chess not the Arab sort of chess and they were all dressed up in these beautiful little uniforms as soldiers and in gowns and everything else. And the two protagonists were up on little daises at either end and they’d call out

and the little children would move to the next square. And it was just fascinating to watch this chess game going on. They had rides and they had everything going on at the place. It was just a basic New Year’s celebration. And towards the evening we started to realise that the numbers were disappearing very quickly and people were talking as well. We finally caught on that something was actually happening. We assumed it was

just an assault somewhere and the military had been called back because at that time we couldn’t hear very much going on. There had been rumours for a long time that the Viet Cong units were on the move but you heard that all the time and after a while didn’t take very much notice of it. So we saw the New Year in and went back to our quarters but then at about 2 o clock in the morning you started to hear the

mortars and the rockets happening and this was bigger than ever before. Normally they would set up a rocket or a mortar and they’d fire maybe one or two rounds only and then pack the thing up and run straight away. This time it was 10, 20, 100 rounds going off and you think, “Oh sugar, this is something extraordinary”. And it was the bombardment of the American base and correspondingly we got dozens of rounds that dropped short into the town as well.

As soon as you started hearing that go off you didn’t wait for anybody to phone up. When the rounds went off somebody was going to get hurt and you just went down to the hospital. And that’s what we did only it just kept coming. And daylight came and you saw the tanks in the street and you could hear the actual fighting going on. At times it got very, very heavy and you realised that the helicopter gun ships were

firing here. In fact the roof of our compound, when we went back to it, was about that deep in cartridges. The helicopters were almost stationery over the top of our roof firing at the VC 200 metres away. There were paddy fields, there was a raised dyke where the train line went along and they were on the other side of the dyke, they got that close. And the choppers were

stopping them here. We started to realise, “Hang on, this is very close to home guys”. And it was getting bigger. And it was all very chaotic. You realised there was fighting in the towns. You could hear the tanks and the heavy gun fire and you could see the fighter planes actually strafing the air field itself, their own people, or their own ground and you realised, “Gee Whizz”. We really thought at that time that it was

just an attack on the base. And they happened to need to go through the town and everything like that. And we were working so you didn’t have a chance to talk to anybody about the whole thing. Slowly it filtered through that it was not just here it was also Saigon and it is every other town in the whole of South Vietnam. You know, it’s big this time. And you started to get worried because it had never happened like this before.

No. There was one policeman on the front gate. The hospital staff, no, and the Vietnamese weren’t either. He was the guard on the front gate there. I actually saw him shoot somebody. Not during the Tet offensive but at another time. I don’t know the background to the whole thing but there were patients coming through the front door and he actually

challenged one person. And this young guy stopped, turned around and ran away. As soon as he ran away he just pulled out the revolver and shot him dead. Why he challenged him I don’t know but the civilian police were very notorious for that. If they challenged you, you stopped dead and don’t move at all. We were taught that very, very quickly as well. But he seemed to be some sort of security guard

on the front. The could have come through anywhere – talk about the front gate, what about the other 3 sides? You could just walk in so why bother about the front gate. But that’s what impressed us also in the Tet offensive is the fact that we’d always wondered what would happen if there was a fairly big offensive. Would have the town rise up and support the VC? Everybody tended to expect something like that would

happen because it had to be something like 50/50 or even more. In fact it didn’t happen at all. We were really quite astonished. The reverse actually happened. Maybe the South Vietnamese soldiers had something really easily to fight back at and not just sort of ambushes. There were people in that shop and that building and go and get them. It was a more equal basis I suppose. They actually fought. In particular the police fought as

well, the white mice, and they had rifles and grenades. It’s interesting their police, it’s a bit different from ours here. Our hospital staff couldn’t understand – we talk about police here – no guns well at that time there were no guns. And if you need any help you go and see a policeman – “What?” There’s no way in the world they would go and talk to a policeman at all. And of course if they blew the whistle everybody in the whole place just froze absolutely

still, you didn’t move a muscle. The couldn’t understand how police could be very different. And you realised also that Nuet and Cuci in their 20s had always known war their whole life. “Footpaths are covered in barbed wire”. “No, you walk on footpaths”. They couldn’t understand how you could possibly walk on a footpath. “You can go out at any time of the day or

night and nobody would stop you”. “That doesn’t happen”. “Yes, it does”. They’d come up with a whole different existence – war all the time. A lot of people criticised them that they tended to fight a 9 to 5 war. Well, if it’s been going on for 20 years you do tend to get into a routine and you can’t spend 24 hours a day. It was very different for the Americans and the Australians you were there for twelve months and you could work a

24 hour day but they were going to be there when you left as well so they had to rationalise it a little bit.

No not at all. I actually asked my Mum the same thing. You were a bit sensible and you didn’t put stuff in their as well

but our mail actually went through some sort of aid office in Saigon, the Australians, it went through the Australians and not the South Vietnamese. Our administrator used to take it into Saigon once a week and my Mum said that nothing was every opened at all. I was also a little worried that I was taking photographs of military establishments and things like this and could that be used in

some way but all my 35mm slides got through perfectly all right. As far as I know I had no censorship in any way but then you didn’t talk very much about military stuff either because Mum didn’t know anything about it and she was more interested in other stuff, whether you were still alive. But nothing happened like that as far as I’m aware.

I had some interesting things there. Somewhere in the middle of all this funny things happened so I’ve got to tell you those things too. We used to have a little tiny American jeep and we used to love it. You could throw it around, bald tyres, you could do almost anything and it was totally indestructible and left hand drive too.

So we would use that. And you got sleep wherever you could. You went home and got something to eat and you came back and worked again. And we just went on and on. I remember back to driving back to the hospital about 3 o clock in the morning which really was absolutely stupid and weird but you had to. I came boring down the main street and then stood on the brakes and landed that far from a tank. It was a massive South

Vietnamese tank at the crossroads. And here it was there with these enormous two barrels right across the top and two grinning South Vietnamese soldiers there. They said they could see me coming and I was just going to pile straight into it, a sixty-tonne tank, and I wouldn’t have done any damage to it at all. They were sitting there just grinning their heads off. So “Phew” that was about the closest I

came to getting (temporary loss of sound) – and do whatever you possibly could. You carried patients. I was a radiographer, yes, I took X-rays but your job didn’t stop there. You were putting stitches and sutures in and doing all the minor stuff that was going on. You’d be in

theatre assisting the surgeons because you’d have 5 or 6 tables running at the same time so another pair of hands were needed and we just didn’t have enough people. You dabbled in a number of areas that you wouldn’t consider doing because of the sheer necessity of it. Tet when it was sort of all over and done with the devastation

in the town was quite horrendous. We had some reasonable things happen to us. There was this massive water tower and the Viet Cong were up in the tower and sniping around the place and, yes, as you moved form building to building the bullets whistled past you. I don’t think they were - they were just aiming at virtually anything that moved and whether it was a soldier or not, they probably didn’t

realise that they were just shooting to try and keep it away. It died eventually. They got stormed there. I think from Tet it was the total shock of the whole thing and that was what Tet was all about. The fact that they obviously lost really was quite irrelevant to the whole thing. That they could actually do it on such a massive scale and I think that actually threw

the Americans. Then when they turned around in May and basically did the same thing again a second time on a much smaller scale the sacrifice in lives must have been extraordinary. To have the will to do that and to be able to do as well I think is what really started the back off as far as the Americans were concerned.

So from a political point of view it certainly won. From a military point of view it basically destroyed the Viet Cong as such. Certainly their infrastructure was destroyed and much of their regiments were destroyed as well because after that you did see the change to the North Vietnamese. Because for about 6 months after that you could start to see the stories of the -

and the North Vietnamese who were always a distinctly different person as well. And certainly the more trained soldiers just because the VC did not have them. They didn’t have the troops any more. And that was the major difference I think as well.

Not really because there were some stories going around that the North Vietnamese –look, whether you like it or not the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese didn’t like each other. The Viet Cong were also South Vietnamese, they weren’t North Vietnamese. And they wanted help, logistics and everything from the North Vietnamese, yes, but they still didn’t like them.

And some of the Viet Cong were not communists either. They were nationalists and they were other things as well. It was a pretty mixed bunch although the majority obviously were communist. There are been some stories around that the North Vietnamese weren’t too unhappy about that, about losing Tet, because it got rid of their local opposition there as well and therefore they could now legitimately come in because of the increased numbers and run the war their way and also eventually take over

whereas they couldn’t actually do that against the South Vietnamese, Viet Cong. They were VC fighting in the South. And that was the propaganda, it was an uprising, and now you virtually had an invasion from the North. Whether that is just afterwards people said that but you could see the change in the war and even towards the end,

the two offensives, everything died off. Surprisingly towards the end of our time there, there was almost no fighting. And you thought was this the end and was it really happening. Now that seems to have lasted for several years as they regrouped and eventually of course the North Vietnamese did do an invasion. But it also suckered the Americans in.

Things were dying down and the Vietnamisation of the Vietnamese army was a good excuse to get out. And they needed an excuse as well so this was the way to go and of course they left the South Vietnamese there to what was almost a regular invasion which was a totally different way of fighting. The North Vietnamese came in with tanks down the main highways with artillery and it was a regular invasion. It wasn’t a Viet Cong insurgency any more.

It was a very different way of doing things. And of course the South Vietnamese couldn’t hold that sort of thing back and there were no Americans there any more. So a combination of things sort of let them all down.

Very little. Our main source was some of the Americans who were actually staying in our quarters for various things or from the helicopter aviation battalion who were actually

quartered right next door to us, especially their officers who were quartered there. They flew their helicopters from the main base but their residences were there and they had some bars, their messes, there. So we’d go in and talk to them. There was no regular news bulletin. You did get information through admin from the Australian Embassy. All of it was very ad hoc. A lot of it was out of date and a lot of it was

speculative as well. Miles and miles of rumours and it came from every direction. There was no one regular source that you could depend on at all. And you just felt you were in a total vacuum most of them time.

Well, what television.

There ain’t no such thing in South Vietnam basically. That’s not true actually there was one in the American mess next door, there actually was a television set. And the Americans had their own military TV station and their own military radio – do you believe what was on there? That was basically the only television. But it was quite true because my mother would ask me questions about things that were happening literally in the same

area and I had no idea what was going on at all. There was no communication like that – not 5 or 6 TV stations broadcasting both sides of the Iraq War. It just wasn’t on.

Yes, quite a few and I became friends with one of them because he realised that we actually had VC living in the same hospital

so he came to interview those ones. I met him a few times after that on social things when I went to Saigon as well and he was killed in the Tet offensive with 3 of his colleagues in an ambush thinking their press cards would stop the bullets. It didn’t work that way.

We heard a lot about them. I

actually didn’t see any at all while we were there. Most – well, think about it – there was only about a dozen of us in the one little area. Most of the entertainment was done at the big military bases either at Bien Hoa or Long Bin or one of those and it was Bob Hope and all that sort of stuff would come in. Why would you go? There’d be 20,000 guys. You couldn’t even see the people on the

stage let alone anything else. And besides that we had our own blonde nurses anyway we didn’t have to see the go-go dancers up there, our girls were even better than that anyway. A lot of it was just that. They wanted to go there and yell and scream at the girls that they hadn’t seen for all that period of time. You always wonder why the VC never actually hit one of those things. They would have killed an awful lot at the same time. On one occasion there was

an entertainment group that came through Bien Hoa and stayed with us one night as recuperation, they didn’t do a show or anything like that. They weren’t any of the known names of anything and they seem to have been actually linked to one of the American private enterprisers around the place who was supplying smaller groups of entertainers

to different localities. Some of them had been touring the country for twelve months. And I think I was amazed at the number of entertainers that really did go to Vietnam. They must have been in their thousands. You had the big names who did the spectaculars but there were thousands of smaller groups, threes and fours, who toured around and were paid to do that as well.

There was a story in that one by itself unrecorded.

Yes, love them. Mr Whitlam and his wife Margaret were two big ones I suppose. I’m saying that because I had never appreciated how tall and how large those two people were by comparison with the Vietnamese and the

Vietnamese were absolutely astonished at the size of those two. At that time they were actually the opposition, the leader of the opposition, but the reason I’m sort of joking about that is I remember seeing him in the door of the hospital. And the two of them filled the whole door from the top to the sides to the bottom and I thought, “These are absolutely enormous people,” and that was certainly the comment made afterwards. Mr

Gorton was there as well. He came in. Mr Hasluck who was External Affairs and a couple of others as well mainly on goodwill visits. The Vietnamese certainly turned on all the PR [public relations] at that time and had the cameras and everything else around. Often it was to try and solicit aid, civilian aid. And of course the Australians were there to see what the aid money was being

spent on. It was interesting to sit around the table and listen to the politicians and people talking to them as well. And I’d have to say no matter who it was they were very supportive of what was happening and Mr Whitlam the same as well. I know later on he might have come out and said different things but he was certainly supportive of what we were trying to do because

we were predominantly civilian oriented. And he had a good understanding that the basic need was pretty desperate there. Whether he agreed or disagreed with the war that was something totally different. You got the impression that, yes, they were a help. But it was a really flying visit. We were all around for 2 hours and you’d get your pictures taken and then out of the door again.

Yes and no. You tended to ignore them most of the time. Look, if you had work who the hell cares it just didn’t happen at all. Often the visit was actually arranged around “siesta time” because Vietnam did. You worked like hell in the morning, you had a siesta in the middle of the day, and you worked like hell in the evening and the afternoon because it was just so hot.

Only made Australians tended to work a little bit more in that middle part. But often that’s when they were because people really were not doing the basic work at that time. They didn’t really disrupt us very much. If there was any surgery or anything to be done that took priority and often that was a good way of showing them the real work rather than the PR stuff. I know they were quite fascinated to go

in and talk to the Viet Cong prisoners next door. Young guys absolutely shocked and wounded but young guys once again so they were certainly fascinated by that, the real enemy.

We had one legitimate ones, well actually two

legitimate ones, because Dr Stave the medical super, the team leader, had his wife with him so that was legitimate. One of the other medical doctors who was with us for twelve months he had his wife with us as well and that was legitimate too. There was a liaison between one of our younger doctors, the third one for the twelve months, with one of the nurses. It took a while to

sort of build up and eventually because – I don’t quite know why, she left early and went back to Australia. John broke down after that with her gone, literally broke down, and couldn’t handle anything whatsoever and he was shipped out of there with a replacement for him as well. And he did marry her when he went back to Australia. We heard

that part. We were very surprised. We were surprised about the whole thing because they were just like chalk and cheese, two very different people, but they really got on very well. I don’t know why we never – it was open, it was quite discreet and very much above board. We all knew it was going on. We couldn’t understand how it could actually happen and I remember we were

shocked when she left first of all and then he broke down. It seems to have ended happily as far as I know in the short term anyway – I don’t know if it lasted any longer.

Yes, I believe so. That was said to us on the way through because they said they recognised at times that things could happen or something could happen at home and you had to go home

as well. They recognised that some people just couldn’t stand it, the whole thing. From a work view, or being in Vietnam point of view, that didn’t happen to any of us at all. The John situation was a broken heart which really could have happened anywhere in the world. I don’t think Vietnam had any say in that. The option certainly was there but as far as I know none of us had any reason to

take it up.

The last 100 days – you’ve probably heard the stories. Most people did have a map. Often it was just a big circular thing going down to “Bingo” on the other end there. Yes, you’d been there for a long time.

You didn’t work 5 days and have 2 days off. We started work early in the morning and you’d have a bit of a break in the middle of the day and you’d work through to whatever time at night. You went and had some drinks and sometimes in the middle of the night and you had to get up and come back to the hospital again. This could go on for ten days in a row. If things seemed quiet you could toddle off to Saigon. Other people were more adventurous and went to a few other places as well and you just grabbed whatever breaks you could.

Most of the time you were working and that was fair enough. You knew you were there for 12 months and you could throw everything in for that 12 months. I was lucky to have R&R [Rest and Recreation] on the way through and at that time I went to Japan and then came back via Hong Kong. And, yes, I went with a nurse as well, OK Carmen, but as it worked out it was just because both of us were going to Japan.

We both stayed at youth hostels and toured Japan in youth hostels and had a great time.

Yes, it was. And then we got back to Hong Kong ready to fly and the flight was cancelled. And we’d spent all our money and we had nothing, not a single penny at all. That was my present to myself, a Rolex watch, and I’d spent everything on it.

All of a sudden, “You can’t have a flight for 2 days” But what do we do for two days? No hotel, no food, no money, no nothing, so the Embassy was a big help. They billed us afterwards as well. I had a great time and actually enjoyed Japan at that time seeing it. It must have been very different then from now the Japan of these days.

Yes and you could, you could go almost anywhere in Vietnam if you went to the Americans and said, “Can I please?” You couldn’t sort of rely on any particular times and you may have gaps between one place and another but you could basically bum a lift anywhere because there seemed to be helicopters going in every direction. They used to deliver the mail by helicopter up to the

highlands. That must have cost them about $10,000 to deliver 4 letters. So if one of the chopper guys was going somewhere and you had time off, “Can I come with you?” “Of course” They were pleased to have anybody with you at that time. You could go and hop on a Caribou and you could end up somewhere. How you got back was always your problem. You hoped that somebody was coming in the other direction and most of the time they

were. But you always had a problem - you couldn’t get back for 9 o clock on Monday morning it was always sometime you could get back again. If you were a South Vietnamese you wouldn’t be able to do this sort of thing at all but being an Australian you could con anybody into anything particularly if you happened to have got your mother to send several slouch hats over and you had a slouch hat that you could hand over as well. That used to buy a fortune. They used to love those sort of things.

Yes, I did. The one place I didn’t get to unfortunately and some of our team did was Angkor Wat in Cambodia and this was legitimate as well. A group of us had actually made some arrangements to go and see Angkor Wat at that time and I had to work and didn’t do it and

then they did, they saw it. Almost weeks after that it was actually closed down there and that was the start of the Khmer Rouge and everything else that went on. So it was closed for the next 10 or 15 years and I was always a bit disappointed that I hadn’t had the opportunity to see that. But sometimes you’d do some silly things like grab a jeep and just drive off into the countryside. And you’d think,

“Wow, this is ridiculous guys,” because there were some fascinating little areas in Vietnam. Most of it was paddy fields and then every now and again there’d be a rocky outcrop like a big stone stuck in the middle of nowhere. And if you drove up to that and then climbed up there was usually a Buddhist temple or a monastery or something – a little tiny thing on the top of it. It was really very, very fascinating but you think now “this is stupid”. You should have been

doing those sort of things. Young guys do it I suppose.

Yes. It had it as well. We had a Land Rover and we had an old Holden there which was most unusual. They were battered and dilapidated and falling apart all the time. There were no spare parts, they kept going but certainly nothing new at all.

Yes.

Between us guys? Nothing whatsoever. Come on, come on.

As far as I know none of our girls slept around at all. They didn’t need to if you know what I mean there were half a million Americans there. And most of them were educated women and they were early to mid 20s and reasonably attractive and

given Vietnam they could have had their choice, literally. It was quite extraordinary. They always used to say the same thing that back home nobody would have looked at them and here you could have 100 guys in the 1 night. So they certainly played it for all it was worth. But it was really all above board and there was only one occasion where I think something might have happened where I can really say I’m pretty well sure of it.

The interesting thing was that the Yanks weren’t after sex. You had hundreds of thousands of local girls and you could buy that and not have a hassle. They wanted to talk to round-eyed girls who could talk good English and carry on a conversation. And most of our girls did that. If we went to a party they were at a table with 10 Americans – 1 and 10 Americans. And they’d just want to talk about things

and particularly talk to the Australian girls because most of them had no idea about Australia. They really had no idea at all so it was sort of a fantasy land as far as they were concerned. So our girls basically were counsellors I suppose and PR people and all of that and it got them everywhere. It got them to very

high class parties and trips and, look, I do know at one of the parties they actually, you know, the classic thing, sent a chopper down to the coast to get the lobsters to bring them back. They thought they may have liked lobster but that’s the sort of thing that happened as well. The thing about the Americans was that

unlike our units where the whole unit went in and out the American units stayed there and people joined it and left. So you had a rotation of people all the time. And you realised that the maximum that people were there was 12 months and you’d never see them again. I think the girls were totally the same way. Have a good time, have an enjoyable time and all of that and don’t get too serious. One of the girls did and it seemed to be very serious as well and

reciprocated and I do know that when she was finished she went to the United States. Whether anything ever came of it I don’t know. She was the only one that really fell seriously. A couple of others certainly had some interesting relationships with some of the guys there and you wondered about them a little bit at times but most of it wasn’t.

How many pictures do you want? There were a few there, the bars down the main street there. And most of the bars were run by ex-American soldiers most of whom who had been sergeants or master sergeants and possibly still were

and in their spare time owned a bar and fleeced everybody they got. It was really tough stuff. Of course the girls were in there and Saigon Tea and all that sort of stuff but they certainly were prostitutes. There were a couple of very classy brothels in town for officers only as well on the outskirts in some of the villas and boy we visited a couple of those. It was really surprising, some of the

American brass or even South Vietnamese if they wanted to have a cocktail party it was held at the brothel because it was a villa with beautiful grounds and you had these extremely elegant women around who did a lot of the serving and moved around and talked and mixed. And it took a little while for you to realise that no this is not an Embassy cocktail thing I know where this

is but you would always swear that you were in the cocktail circuit in the embassies in Saigon because some of them certainly were at that level. But there were girls absolutely everywhere and certainly when some of the Americans came to parties at ours they brought some of the girls along with them as well. So there were obviously some fairly close relationships with them. We had close relationships with some of them as

well because they had to be checked out. So we had a VD [venereal disease] clinic basically and they had to get treated and they’d come along to the hospital. And they were quite open about it. You could certainly tell when those girls walked in by comparison with the nicer, particularly a few of the more strict Buddhist girls who basically wouldn’t even talk to you unless they had a friend there as well. That’s why

Cuci and Nuet the two nurses you’d never talk with one. There’d always have to be two of them there because if you were talking with one it would be gossip. In the middle of nowhere it doesn’t matter that’s sort of the rules. And you can sort of see that middle class reserved group there and of course you had the field girls who were working to death as well and then the very elegant bar girls.

Some of them in town were real tarty which is probably the best way you could say it. The short leather skirts and the boots and all the coloured hair and the garishness of it. And they were a shock there those girls. And then the other ones you had the most elegant and sophisticated woman you could ever imagine as well especially at the major brothels, extraordinary women, but it was fairly open

the whole thing.

Yes.

Yes, exactly right, yes. I got a “Dear John” half way through. Why - because I didn’t give her my MGB [Morris Garages – British car], a stupid thing to do. Yes,

Eileen won’t ever see this one I hope will she – she knows about her. I had an MGB and I was going away for 12 months. What do I do with it, it was 5 years old and I knew when I came back I’d probably buy something else. I thought what I’ll do is I’ll just sell it, it had never caused me any problems and get top money and just put it in the bank and go from there. Wrong move.

I should have given it to Steph because when I didn’t do that and I moved away that sent a big message. So she toddled off to Sydney just before I left as well. And we still corresponded but obviously that seemed to be the break at that time. So, yes, about

six months or so later on I got a “Dear John” letter saying I’m getting married to somebody else and all this sort of thing. Oh my gosh - wrong thing, wrong time and wrong everything.

How many bottles do you mean? Basically, yes, I certainly was that. I could see it coming in the letters. We were certainly corresponding there. And the interesting thing

is I’ve seen her several times since then and more recently in fact because of emails we’ve certainly got in touch once again. We’re very good friends and I’d have to say probably the best friend in the world I’ve ever got. So we never touch on anything else it’s pretty straight now and besides that it’s 30 years now -

- one of the wrong moves.

What do you mean the lack of it or the volume of it. You could have quite easily become absolutely a total alcoholic there considering the amount we actually did drink I don’t understand how we didn’t and I certainly haven’t.

When you come back to Australia it is one hell of a shock when you find the price of it. We did drink. We drank a lot over there. I can’t say it was anything to do with the trauma or the war or anything like that because gee whizz casualty at the Royal Brisbane was just as bad. It was nothing to do with that sort of thing or the stress of it. Hospital work is just the same anywhere. A lot of it was being in a foreign place and you couldn’t really go out at

night and no television. Every now and again there would be a movie or something like that on in the American things but very infrequently. You sat around and you played cards and you drank and then you toddled off to bed. Sometimes you put a tape on and you’d be dancing - very limited social life really. If there’d been more social life you could have been or possibly less.

Yes if you could call it that. It looked more like a garage and I thought it was a garage in the first place because it had no air conditioning and no freezer at all. It really was basically – I kept thinking because it didn’t have a roller door on the front it had two big doors that closed, two big wooden ones, but it looked exactly like a garage.

It took me some time to realise this was the actual morgue. The problem was it didn’t hold very much and you had to get people out of there. The relatives had to come and pick them up very quickly otherwise they would be disposed of. In some of the offensives and things we had bodies stacked literally in the yard outside. You could tell the locals if they were coming for a body they would come with an extremely elaborate coffin, beautiful, usually

red and yellow and painted and everything else. You could see the affluence at times when it happened and at other times there’d be bodies there for days on end almost until the authorities had to come and get those people because nobody had claimed the body. But it wasn’t like a stainless steel morgue it was steel racks and you put the stretcher into it but no air conditioning

and no freezer, none of that.

Yes. Actually they are not the worst burns. Don’t forget we were dealing mainly with the civilian population but the worst burns we had were kerosene burns because they used kerosene for

cooking. We didn’t have gas for cooking in those days and we didn’t have electricity so kerosene was it and the number of times that the kerosene cookers would explode and do things like that and they’d come in covered in them. I’ve got some slides there and you’ve got a red person from top to bottom with big chunks of skin just dropping off. We had the X-ray department and then there was a room on the other side of the X-ray department with two baths in it.

And the burns patients would be brought in to soak in the baths and then the worst flesh would be slowly taken off them. Many of them weren’t in pain mainly because the burns were so bad and they’d been, you know, burned off. But faces, most of those were really top end. They could walk but the top of them there was nothing left.

No noses, no ears, no lips and no eyelids and this sort of thing and no eyes at times and certainly no hair. Anybody who was really hit by napalm didn’t get to us at all because that had to be a very serious military – you don’t drop napalm in the town so that would have to be outside. If they lived long enough maybe they would get to us there but most of them wouldn’t have lived through that.

Phosphorous, yes, and that was fascinating because we did exactly what you do here. You turn the lights off and you go looking for it. That used to be one of my jobs as well at that time because you’d have the person on the thing and the doctor would be taking the pieces out. They are the side of match heads only and they’re just burning slowly down and down and down and you were trying to get

at them. And the rest of us would be sort of wandering around trying to see these things because you can see them but once they’ve burned in a little bit further and blood comes in and things like that you’re really pushing to try and get them but you had to. And they were very painful because mostly the people were perfectly all right other than that but there was a red hot poker just slowly boring a hole through them.

Any of the really bad phosphorous cases usually ended up in the morgue. They were dead by the time they arrived. I’ve certainly got slides of that as well and of course a lot of that was to do with the fact that you were transporting them 10 or 15 kilometres and it would take hours to do that sort of thing.

Babies. It was very difficult at times to gauge exactly how old they were. I know this sounds funny but often

you could tell they were VC because - most of the time you had the VC who worked during the day and then maybe did sabotage and things like that but most of the VC we saw were almost the full-time VC who lived underground. And as a result of that they also tended to have an unusual skin colour, a pallor about them. They certainly had an unusual hair

style as well like a sort of pudding basin cut and they seemed very stoic. They just closed down. But they were young. They’d be 14, 15 or 16 years of age. Sometimes some were a little bit older than that but most of the time you got the impression that

anybody older than that was either one of their NCOs or officers and they’d get whisked away rather quickly. The general soldier was certainly very, very young and the dead VC that I’ve seen in the hospital as well were very, very young. That was certainly true of the South Vietnamese but not quite as young as the VC.

Yes.

No because I presume they were mainly Americans who went to the American doctors in the base. There were not very many South Vietnamese men who came in. Whether they got treated by their GPs [General (medical) Practitioner] and of course they wouldn’t have the stigma of coming to an Australian hospital or whether in fact they didn’t

frequent it quite so often. If you were a South Vietnamese soldier and that happened I would assume you’d go to a South Vietnamese military hospital there but certainly the civilian population, no. It was quite noticeably the lack of it. But I don’t think they were associating with the same girls who were prostituting to the Americans. I just don’t think they would have done that it was certainly “That’s American stuff” and that sort of thing.

Pencillin at least to start with and derivatives of that, mostly it was fairly simple stuff. If it got any more complicated than that they were usually referred on to somebody in Saigon for much more advanced treatment. Mostly we were a frontline, do what you can now.

None. No, the leprosy was actually - there was a leprosarium out there because leprosy is a real big no, no. and the leprosarium, their catchment area was all the south part of the country and they all went to there. I don’t know how many patients there were. There were several

hundred patients there. We basically went to the leprosarium they were never allowed out. Now leprosy is not that catching you can’t sort of pick it up that easily. Tuberculosis isn’t that catching either. With tuberculosis you’ve got to be very run down, particularly these days, malnutritioned to be susceptible to it and then you’re

could[?] to get it and that doesn’t matter where you are in the world. If you’re reasonably fit and healthy and good food and everything else your main chances of catching it are certainly much less. But the main thing is you tended to wear a mask or get the patient to wear a mask. Your biggest worry was them coughing on you, coughing up blood and sputum and things like that. You took those basic precautions that way.

Some of them were just so sick as well that you had to do something for them.

The little tin shack? It virtually was a little tin shack. The whole area was no bigger than what we’re in here now and that was the waiting room included.

The X-ray room was one small room with an X-ray table and it ad an X-ray tube and it had what you call a buckie, an upright unit as well, and a control panel. It all fitted into a room approximately 4m x 3m which is about the smallest you can actually have. Next to that was a little tiny dark room and I mean a little dark room – basically a cupboard. And that’s all you needed with all the chemicals in there.

The biggest hassle we had was that ideally your chemicals for photography should be about 68 degrees Fahrenheit. In Vietnam that was almost impossible and we had no refrigeration units or anything like that. We were lucky to even have running water half the time as well. So unfortunately much of our chemistry was actually done on higher temperatures. Luckily later on we actually got chemicals that would actually

do that but the problem is that once you start getting to those temperatures your pictures get grainy and they start to get washed out and they’re not as sparkling and crisp. There was a little tiny office area mainly for registration and filling out the forms and stuff like that to keep a record of what was going on. And then a waiting room where down one side was a wooden bench and the mobile

patients and their relatives sat on that one. And a concrete floor and an awning is about the best you could call it - single-sheeted tin over the top and the stretchers and we used military stretchers only little low legs on them and they were just lined up out there. Something like a cattle shed in western Queensland is about the same thing. It was very

basic and very primitive type of stuff.

It was actually American. It was a Picker Machine. Nobody could tell me exactly where it came from but you could have X-ray machines which are basically stationery machines built in one place. And you could actually have mobile ones that you can push around for going to wards and you have those now. And you have other

ones that are somewhere in the middle that have been made almost for this situation. I got the impression that it was an ex-United States military machine there. It was very robust and very solid like brass iron and brass and things like this rather than tin steel nowadays. It was very heavy stuff as well. The dials were actually brass and we used to polish them all

up. It was a museum piece but the beauty of it was there was very little to go wrong with it. It was relatively portable. So I’m assuming that it was something very similar to what they probably used in the MASH units in the Korean War and somehow it got over there. But the Americans in Vietnam had certainly much newer equipment that this so

I’m presuming it was an ex MASH type of thing.

A room, just an ordinary room with open windows. They had air conditioning units when they worked in them there and overhead lights, the usual theatre lights, nothing fancy once again with the spotlight. A fairly basic operating table that certainly raised and

lowered and could tilt. Once again nothing like anything of quality. However, for what it was it was good. It was like the X-ray equipment and most of it was fairly solid as well. It was very mechanical. You don’t have electrical stuff because you had no electricity there and even if you had been working on generators often the quality wouldn’t have been good enough. So everything was basically

mechanical as much as possibly and very strongly built as well so good for that situation.

A big one. This was before HIV [human immunodeficiency syndrome] / AIDS [acquired immune deficiency syndrome] sort of thing there and most sterilisation was done by steam. So we did have a central sterilising area and most hospitals in the world certainly had that at the time. Don’t forget needles and anything else were all cleaned and recirculated. Syringes weren’t

disposable. They were glass ones. And you took them apart, cleaned them up and sterilised them. Our sterilisers, we had two large ones and a couple of smaller ones as well. Because there was steam you steamed to actually sterilise. That was a problem there. The sterilising actually was done by two Vietnamese as well and I

do know that our staff, at least at the beginning, were complaining about the quality of what was done. You used to put tape on them and once they were sterilised the tape would change colour and that was an idea to give you an idea of had it been in there long enough. And these sort of things didn’t happen. Sometimes you’d open the package up and you’d find there’d still be some stuff on some of the instruments and things like that so bad

washing – you know, laid back, lackadaisical and typical Vietnamese type. They were a very laid back people and who cares, who worries and life goes on. You’ve got to put this in perspective. When you consider the condition of the patients that we got in – who cares. So they got a bit of an

infection from an instrument? Guess what they’ve just had run through them? The wounds are not just nice clean wounds. They’re full of gunk and rubbish and the flesh is dying because it has been burned from the shell. It is rotting already because it might have taken them 2 days to get to us. They’ve got gangrene going in there. Who cares a bit about some of that, their trauma was even worse.

They would infect the instruments more than anything else. If you’re talking these days of course that’s quite a different situation in our world. At times some of the surgery was virtually done outside as well, some of the minor stuff, speed was the main priority and then treat everything you could with antibiotics from then on.

Yes and no. The volume of work did get to you, yes. What you had to do, no. In fact it was all from my point of view relatively simple and the doctors were saying the same thing as well because once again you weren’t doing intricate heart surgery or brain

surgery to that sort of degree. It was really fairly basic get people up and going sort of thing. It was just the sheer volume of it. At times you’d look out and see 40 stretchers outside and wonder whether they’re ever going to finish at all and you knew that once it happened there’d be another lot coming in. So from that point of view, yes, but from a professional only point of view, no.

It certainly did not stretch your competence there.

Yes - torches and kerosene lights and this sort of thing. Obviously when that happened we had no X-rays anyway so you did it without them which is basically why as much as you could you got those sort of things done while you did have electricity. Often in

theatre we used to have the kerosene lights with reflectors on them and muggins’ job was to hold the things there. It would happen and it would happen at any times. We had a generator but who knows whether the generator would work and then often the generator was so fluctuating that diathermic just wouldn’t work at all. Your theatre lights wouldn’t work because

fluoro lights need a certain level to keep them going and of course they were flickering and dying and all this sort of stuff so you just wouldn’t turn them on because the generator couldn’t sort of hack it at all. So you were really back to battery torches and kerosene lights.

When I was talking about lack of painkillers that was mainly before the patients actually got to

us. Once they were actually in the hospital and starting to get treated they got what we had and most of the times we had most of the medicine we required. At times we started to run out and people had to run over to the MASH unit and beg and borrow but most of the time we weren’t too bad. Anaesthetic was much the same way. The cylinders, yes, we begged borrowed and stole the whole lot. We got low on blood and things like

that was well and you had to go and borrow it from wherever you could. I don’t think there was any occasion with the routine stuff that we ever ran out of anything on the way through but it certainly came close at times. Of all things that was our biggest concern, we needed a fairly regular supply of stuff and

eventually we actually got that so it was quite good.

I really wasn’t too worried. I certainly made an inquiry straight away,

“If I’m doing these things what can happen to me,” and it came back, “Nothing, first of all there is no law about it at all”. “Oh, that’s interesting, I can actually do surgery?” “Yes”. Weird but it certainly is quite true – morally whether you should or shouldn’t do it. However, I’d been working in hospitals for a long time and done first aid courses and everything so some basic suturing and

certainly putting plasters on I’d learned that from my Dad so I was pretty good at that. Assisting surgeons – once again they are doing the major work and you are holding stuff and helping them with sutures and things like this. Helping manipulate broken arms and legs and putting the traction on and that sort of thing. It was pretty low level but certainly you wouldn’t have done it in any other country.

In some of the main times – one of the things I found I was good at was actually doing a cut-down onto a vein because veins now you can do that there but if you’ve got a dehydrated child there is no veins, there is not enough in them. So what you’ve actually got to do is cut in here and open the tissue up and actually find a vein. I found I was pretty good at doing that

and would put a cannula in there. Normally a doctor would do that but you are sort of wasting time – it takes you about 20 minutes and I could do it quite satisfactorily. So I could be doing that while they were doing much more serious work. So it gradated to doing that sort of thing as well but no brain surgery.

Only once and, boy, it was quite a ceremony. I’m not quite sure how I ended up doing that as well. I think I was sort of co-opted in as a representative of the whole thing. I was very confused by the whole thing as it was obviously a Buddhist

ceremony as well and I couldn’t follow it. It was certainly very elaborate and very noisy as well. I went back to the meal or the wake that they had afterwards and that was a very solemn occasion. Only the one, that’s all. The impression was that you were an outsider and you really shouldn’t be there

that it was sort of a family thing. And I think there was a little bit of, “You caused this or you didn’t save them and you were supposed to do that,” sort of thing. You got the impression that you’d failed a little bit too or they thought you’d failed them. Whether they thought that way or not I’m not quite sure but you certainly didn’t feel comfortable.

In our area yes it was but I think it depends on what religion they actually are. You had the big Catholic groups and you also had the big Buddhist groups so cremation was an option as well. What proportion I don’t know. I can’t answer that one I just don’t know.

It wasn’t the Tet offensive. I was buggered and you were totally exhausted at that time but by that time you’d almost got used to that. The time, and I mentioned it earlier on, was when we had a truckload of guys come in blown up by a

mine and that seemed to be endless. There were 25 of them with lower limb and spinal injuries. That was relatively early on and we’d never struck anything like this. You got five or ten patients and you got rid of them and then another five or ten and it was fairly regular sort of work. All of a sudden you had 25 radically traumatised patients all at the one time. That seemed to overwhelm

everybody because once again who do you treat first and what do you do with spinal cases in the first place. Do you spend all your time treating a spinal case and the other people die with their broken limbs? That seemed to be the one that worried us more than anything else and then once we’d got through that everything else didn’t seem quite so bad. Or you got hardened to the whole thing and I do know that

happened and to myself as well. You’d go down at 2 o clock in the morning and you’d almost say to the patient, “What the hell were you doing running into a bullet at 2 o clock in the morning?” It just happened to them and things like this but you started to get tired and you started to get resentful and, “Why did you do this?” sort of thing.

“Didn’t you know better than to run between two soldiers and get yourself shot at? Why didn’t you stop?” That’s when you started to know you’d been there long enough when you started to blame the victim of the whole thing.

You relaxed.

If for some reason there was a lull and it could have been in car accidents or anything like that you got away. You just took the opportunity straight away. Now we all couldn’t do that at times but certainly two or three and sometimes even four days it just stopped and you were all sort of waiting for it to happen again. But we just grabbed the opportunity. And that’s when you went off bumming lifts or doing

whatever you possibly could which is why there was almost never – other than the guys going to Angkor Wat which they had to set up properly you couldn’t plan ahead at all. You couldn’t say, “OK, next weekend we’re going to go and do this”. It just didn’t happen that way because most of the time you had to work anyway. So any time you had you grabbed it and you ran straight away. So it was very ad hoc there.

It took a little while to get used to that but once again we knew we were there for 12 months and the idea was to throw in everything you had for the 12 months and get out. It was a bit different from the Vietnamese who were going to be there for the rest of their lives. You can put up with almost anything I suppose for 12 months.

I’d have to say reasonably disparaging. That’s changed a great deal since then. A lot of it I believe was because the medicine was totally inappropriate for what was happening. There would appear in my understanding to be a place for traditional medicine in certain things but when you’ve got terminal cancer it’s too late by that time. And the same with the

tuberculosis as well traditional medicine was not going to be able to cure that person at that stage and yet it was still persisted with. Whether that could have helped with other things earlier possibly, yes. Once again remember we were probably getting a select group of patients as well and very far down the track. We’re not getting the people who’ve got the minor stuff where traditional medicine and herbal medicine

probably could help them they wouldn’t bother coming to us. We were at the wrong end of the whole thing.

MASH is realistic. Maybe at the beginning of MASH at the end they get very philosophical and they get into a lot of other stuff as well but

so much of what they said was absolutely true. You could sort of see it all in there. China Beach, no, a bit more glamorised although I must admit the beaches down there were just as beautiful. When we went there we weren’t living on China Beach or a beach or anything like that. We were in the middle of the paddy fields so you couldn’t quite do the same thing.

China Beach to me seemed unrealistic. Our experience was you were too busy working to be able to get up to all that sort of stuff. And even American MASH units and places like that they were all working very, very hard so I don’t think there was quite the time to socialise like China Beach. But the real MASH was – it was a different war, the Korean War, as

well but much closer to reality.

My raincoat got pinched. Funny thing to say isn’t it. The last day there I had taken a raincoat with me and the only raincoat I’ve ever owned in my life. And I’d taken it with me and I’d used it because, you know, the heavens opened down there. And

besides that we had these open jeeps with a roof on it and no sides so you got pretty wet. And I’d had it all the time and on the very last day I left it in my jeep there and came back and it was gone. I was pissed off. I don’t know why. Why didn’t they steal it earlier or something like that and why anybody would want it I have no idea whatsoever. The

last week of leaving was fun but it was really very, very sad. I honestly don’t remember how many little get togethers I had with different members of the staff and Nuet and Cuci and Mr To and Mr Tau and a couple of others we’d go out to lunch – all fairly low key. The most embarrassing thing was the presents

I was given - once again, very small stuff. The shorter of the two vases I showed you there and a little tea service. One of the loveliest things I’ve got is a cane basket, only a small round cane basket, with the finest cane I’ve ever seen. It was almost like lacework and I was really quite taken aback by that.

I got a little boat made out of horn. And it just kept coming all little tiny things that they gave. And the problem I had was I was caught by surprise and I had nothing to give back at that time which really embarrassed me but as I found out later on that wasn’t supposed to happen anyway as I was the

one that was leaving and not them. Just all of a sudden to see this happening – it was a thank you at the end. And then all of a sudden you realised that you were probably not going to see these people again but that was not quite so true. Yes, it was their way of saying

thank you. It was really very, very nice and so much so that I actually volunteered to go back. When I got back, fairly soon after I got back, I was approached and asked would I be interested in another tour. And I said, “Yes”. Unfortunately or fortunately I met somebody else in the meantime, Eileen, and that sort of stopped me at that

time and things moved on. I was then approached just before I got married as to whether I would like to go back again, this time into Cambodia and not as a radiographer to go back in as an administrator of a team in there. I would have gone and Eileen said that would have been all right but we were actually getting married at that particular time so it sort of stopped me again doing it.

Maybe it says I some way enjoyed my time there. I got a lot out of it. I grew up in many ways. I also could probably say I found myself at that time and came out of it – I got a lot of positives out of it.

Relatively little and sometimes in the funniest ways. Don’t forget we were a medical team and that was looked on as quite distinctly different there. But I had a weird one. In fact I almost reversed the whole process. I was in the trade

union, the Miscellaneous Workers Union, and I turned up for a meeting at Trades Hall and I wasn’t allowed in. This is some time after the Australians got out. Why? There was a North Vietnamese delegation there. I sort of really flew off at this one. “How come they’re allowed in our Trade Union and I’ve been a union member for 20 years and I wasn’t allowed in. What’s going on about this?”

It really seemed ironic at the time but I have had no backlash at all or any criticism in fact. Some people, once you say you’ve been there you can see it happening but once you say as part of a medical team it just changes straight away. Or, “Were you in the military?” “No, as a civilian”. It just fizzles from then on. “Why did you do it in the first place?, “Basically probably I supported the idea of the whole thing”

But, no, really very little trauma.

I can appreciate what those guys went through. I was in a totally different area. My life was not on the line and I didn’t have to depend that much on my mates. I can see why they did.

So the bonding they have and the reasons they do it I can understand it. I don’t very often go to Anzac Day parades or anything like that but I can certainly understand why they do and support it.

It was coming. You could see it happening it was just a matter of when. Once the Americans pulled out

everybody – no matter what anybody said it had to happen. And then you could see the push down from the North and it was just a matter of how many people were going to lose their lives and how fast it was going to happen. And of course it happened much quicker than anybody thought. A waste of time - the whole thing was a waste of time and it shouldn’t have really happened. And the biggest concern and I’m quite honest about this was the people who were there who were associated with us. Nuet and Cuci

from my point of view but the others as well because they had worked with lots of Australians in the hospital. What was going to happen to them? We really didn’t know because previously there’d been the big problem in Wai [Hue] when the Viet Cong had taken over Wai [Hue] and killed nearly 5,000 of the locals who had associated with the Americans. Was this going to happen? As it happened Nuet’s husband was in the military and he got sent to a re-education camp for

several years and they finally got out. I’m not even going to ask the story of what happened to them on the way through. Cuci is still there. I know she’s not married at all which really surprised me. She’s a very pretty, nice young girl. There must have been something that happened there as well. My biggest worry was the friends that were there and what was going to happen.

I don’t think I had any one. I don’t think there is any one thing that I could say. Sometimes you had successes and things happened and you

could do this but one thing that I always remember is the kids and smiling and laughing. And it all seemed to make it worthwhile. I’ve got some pictures of these urchins – little raggedy shorts and bare feet, splashing around and grins from ear to ear particularly when they sort of teased you about something or pulled the hairs on your legs and things like

this and the fact that they could do it and they felt free enough to do it. And you thought, “Yes, given a chance maybe your whole life could be different”. You are going to come up and you’ll be 18 and you’ll be conscripted with 1,000 of them killed every week maybe it’s a different life - the fact that children were children almost anywhere in the world. Yes, you tried to help them.

No. I don’t know if I would. I don’t know if you’d see any reason to go back any more. Things have changed and moved on and other than Cuci there’d be nobody else there and revisiting I’m not sure I would. The other thing is also I’ve been there already and there are other places in the world. I’d like to go and see

different places. It’s not as though I had any real attachment that would drag me back or revisit my youth or anything like that – no I don’t. I’d like to see somewhere – if I had the choice of spending money in one place or somewhere else I’d go somewhere else. But I’d like to admit that Vietnam is beautiful. The hillside is fantastic and the beaches are superb and the ocean is fantastic as well. There’s so much

beautiful stuff there and certainly the people are as well. They are lovely people.

I feel very sad that the war came out the way it did. I honestly don’t think it had

to. I understand the rationale for the war there and trying to stop the domino affect and to a degree that obviously happened because the rest of it didn’t really fall. However, certainly the way it was conducted was amateurish and certainly not strategic. And it saddened me to see that the Americans have done something very similar in Iraq – won the battle but lost the war sort of thing.

They don’t seem to have learned at all and that’s rather sad. The other thing also I think the Vietnamese people are very nice. They really are a lovely people and yet 20 years down the track or 30 years now they are still one of the poorest nations in the world. They are an industrious, hard-working intelligent people and they are living in almost nothing. And even being

exploited I suppose by some of the multi-nationals in the factories and by their own government as well, they are held back. That country has done nothing in 30 years so even the communists winning didn’t give anything to the people. It would be very different if they’d won and maybe introduced socialism and changed the country around and everybody had benefited. That doesn’t seem to have happened. It has

basically stayed the same and that’s sad.