Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Australia, by parents were born in Australia. I was born in Bondi in 1922, 13th of March. my paternal

grandfather was born in England and migrated at the age of 2, my grandfather was born Poland Russia or whatever it was and migrated at about the age of seventeen or eighteen. And he got a horse and cart and went hawking. And finished up in Narrandera in the country and by the time I was growing up I was always going down to Narrandera to help run the business’, there were two stores there. And when finally I got down there, I

was discharged from the army with a pregnant wife in 1946 we had two stores, one in Narrandera one in Leeton. Each store, they were big stores, each store had about forty or forty-five employees. Those stores, and not only my parents’ stores or my grandparents’ stores, they kept Australia going through the depression. The banks, all they wanted to do was foreclose, the stores kept people going, they gave them food and necessary clothing

and when I went down there in ’46 we still had people on the accounts who owed money from back in the 30’s. That’s the start. My mother because of the stores, she had money, I am writing a book, my son is writing a book and I am asking him to call it, ‘I was born with a silver plated spoon.’ It wasn’t a silver spoon, but we weren’t poor, we were quite well off. The depression didn’t really affect us at all, one of the few people. My father loved travelling,

particularly boats. My mother didn’t particularly, she used to get seasick, but that’s beside the point. My first trip overseas I think I was eight or nine, Dad decided to take us to Colombo, now Ceylon, or Ceylon now Sri Lanka, and said,” Well lets have a holiday over there.” Went over by boat, first class of course and came back and I was then at Scots [College], and I stayed at Scots until the end of 1938.

In 1937 my parents again said to my two sisters, I don’t think I was involved in the conversation, they said, “Do you want to wait until we die to get our money or do you want a trip overseas?” So we went for a trip overseas we were away for about six months, travelling first class all of the way, actually we left Sydney in April ’38 and we went on the Orchides which was her maiden

voyage and we went to all of the ports on the way and I learnt to tie a bow tie because you had to get dressed in a dinner suit every night, except the night you left port, every port. And we arrived in England and stayed there for about three months, and my elder sister wasn’t well. We hired a (UNCLEAR), we didn’t hire a car you couldn’t hire cars in those days and you had cash money, and

you had to have what was called a letter of credit. No such things as Visa cards nothing like that. Travellers’ cheques they didn’t even exist. So Dad spent most of his time going to the bank and getting money because my sisters and Mum were spending money like water. Anyway after three months we got on the Queen Mary that was August 1938

and we went across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary and that happened to be the trip she broke the blue ribbon, that was the fastest trip in those days. We stayed in New York for five or six days, got on a train near Toronto, went via Niagara of course. We across by steam train, three days and three nights on the train. Every eight hours I think it was, the train stopped to change engines. And about every four hours they stopped to put some water on

everybody got out of the train to run up and down the side to get some exercise. We stayed at Banff which was beautiful. We came down by, no flying at that time of course oh no we did fly one trip, we flew from London to Paris when we were there, and I was sixteen at the time and my family was fairly broad minded, they took me to the Folle Bergais. I didn’t look sixteen, at thirteen I was shaving every day, black hair, it was really dark and

even in the army later I was called the Black Bastard.

Well that was my grandfather, it was Poland, whatever it was when he left. Around about that time a lot of Jewish people were allowed out of Europe for the first time. A lot of them went to England, I would say my grandfather on my fathers side,

his parents would have possibly been born in Europe, I don’t know. But England opened her doors at that stage. There is an interesting story about my grandmother on my mothers side, she was born in Australia, but her parents were on a boat to come to Australia and about five days before they left the owners of the boat said they were going to charge them five pound, which was a lot of money in those days to bring their luggage, and they said, “Stick it.” and got off the boat,

and the boat was the Dunbar so they weren’t on the Dunbar. So my grandmother was born in Australia but she wouldn’t have been born otherwise, so that was an interesting Australian story.

Oppression. Particularly the Jews were oppressed in those days, pogroms, absolutely hopeless.

I never knew my grandfather, my mother’s father he actually died the year before Mum and Dad were married

So I don’t think I knew him. I knew my grandmother from that side and she, as women did in those days, after she became a widow she wore nothing but black. She was quite well off, she had a driver and a car. The name off the driver was his last name, Adamson. That was all. I found out later it was George, no one ever called Adamson anything but Adamson.

Well she didn’t drive. Dad finally taught Mum to drive. One other thing, in Narrandera the store there was the General Motors [car manufacturer] dealer. So when we went overseas Dad had a letter to General Motors, so we went in London, we had a car at home it was a big Buick, seven passengers, it had dickie seats in the middle. 1936 Buick, straight eight. The engine was about from here to Bondi long and that’s what I

learnt to drive on. And I wasn’t a silly fool like most kids are these days, out one night Dad just let me drive on Saturday nights and I was out one night with my party and I had my girl, well temporary girl with me. And one of the other girls had been left in the lurch somewhere and she lived out Kogarah way and so silly, I volunteered to take her home. And coming back along that road,

General Holmes drive, which was only two lane in those days, one up one down, bit curvy. I said to my girl, “You watch the speedometer and I will watch the road.” Well I only got up to ninety-three miles an hour. I mean kids don’t do those things these days.

Yes well nothing permanent. One fairly permanent but she dropped out.

I saw her once when I came back. we used to have parties, and we can’t say it now, but parties were very gay, they were gay parties. Life has changed. But we used to go, there was a crew of us, I have got a photo I will show you later, there was a group of six or eight of us and we used to go to the Wentworth Hotel on a Saturday night, we had to dress up in a tux and it cost us five shillings to go in,

which was quite a lot of money. And there would be the six girls and six fellows, and the following Sunday the fellows would get together and say, “Right next week we’re going to so and so you’re taking so and so and I will take so and so.” The rule was you took your girl and you danced with her the first dance and the last dance, and then we all shared around, but they were all our age they weren’t looking for marriage, we weren’t certainly at eighteen, nineteen you’re not looking for marriage. And the girls weren’t, they were out for a good time and

they had a good time.

I don’t know one bloke would meet someone and so on. Anyhow.

As I say Dad had an absolute wonderful brain, but his father and his fathers’ brother had a warehouse in Melbourne, warehouses are gone now. But in the old days you didn’t

import the stuff from overseas, you bought it from a warehouse. And there were big warehouses, Hoffman’s, a whole lot of them, all particularly along York Street, big warehouses. When I say big they were seven or eight storeys high, and they had everything. Some had clothing, some had all sorts of things. The big one was a place called Hoffman’s and they had everything virtually from a needle to an anchor. And if you had a shop you bought from these warehouses. And they had warehouses in Melbourne. Dad was fourteen I think and he was at Scotch

College in Melbourne, so they had money. The two brothers had a fight and my grandfather lost and he came to Sydney and that was the end of that. And he became a financier, which was a fancy name for a moneylender, but they weren’t big money lenders, they never got rich on it, but we did well because my mother had the money.

No I just know that they had an argument, I found that out years later.

To get away from his brother I suppose.

He was in the financial business where Dad used to go and Dad, that was called ‘the office’. It was in Manchester Unity building and it overlooked,

it was a lovely office, it overlooked Hyde Park and in those days you could park in town, but Mum used to drive into town in the big Buick and pick him up in the afternoon. And if I was sick, I was sick quite a bit as a youngster, every day Dad would ring Mum to find out how she was. They were absolutely lovebirds, you have got no idea. Mum was born with a left arm about three or four inches

shorter that her right arm. She played golf very successfully and Mum and Dad were foundation members of the Lakes Golf Club. Which later became, a lot of these foundation members were Jewish because they started it, and later my cousin tried to join there and they wouldn’t have him because he was Jewish. But Mum became the Lake champion

there, but my sister my littler sister, she was five years older than me. She took up golf, it is a great sport, and she took up golf and was champion of the Lakes I think three or four times. She has her name up on the honour board is an honorary board, she was wonderful at sport, not academic at all. My elder sister thinks, whatever she thinks is it. she has been sick all of her life, but it

was mostly her own fault but I won’t go into that.

Oh yes there were a lot of women playing golf. But my mother was a stout woman, and she used to play in corsets and she used to wear her old corsets and she used to say, “I hope I don’t drop dead on the green today, I don’t want anybody to see me in my old corsets.”

Tweed skirts, you didn’t wear pants in those days, all skirts. Much like the women in their silly whites for bowls, that’s gone out of the window. Now I left school, I did the intermediate. I went to Scots Prep and then I went onto Scots and I did intermediate in third years, there was only five years in those days. So you did intermediate in third year which I passed,

four B’s and three A’s but I didn’t get a B or an A in English which is most unusual. But I loved science. And I got A’s in maths, chemistry and physics, loved them but never used them. I have used them but I was always trained to go into the business. When we came back in ’38, in ’37 and ’38 I was in the

Scots Cadets, yes we fired .303 rifles, even at that age, well I was seventeen and eighteen. And yes we fired rifles and we had Lewis guns which were useless of course and we used to have fun, we used to go out, I think we used to be at Liverpool camp which is no longer there. It was just across the river from Liverpool, it was a horrible place. And my first job was in an accountants place, a chartered

accountants of course and in those days to get into an accountants place you had to have a leaving certificate. So my uncle and Dad used this accountants which was one of the major accountancy firms in Sydney, Starkey and Starkey, which then became Fell and Starkey, it has been swallowed up by one of the big companies now. But they were one of the leaders, apart from, one of the bigger accountants was Grace Bros those days and they had an office in Grace

building, which is still there, corner of York, Clarence and King Street, and they were agents for there. And they took me on as a favour and so for the first six months as an office boy I got nothing, not a penny. And for the next six months I got a pound a week. In the meantime before I left I said to Dad, “Look I am sick of coming to you and Mum if I want a pair of socks or a handkerchief”

I worked it out that for thirty shillings a week I could live, I couldn’t buy suits but I could live. I used to buy suits from Gowings, tailor made suits, seven guineas, they were expensive but they were beautiful suits. Had a two or three fittings because it was a three-piece suit in those days, you had a vest. Anyhow they gave me, at the end of six months they gave me a pound a week, I was only going to be there a year,

but when I left they wanted me to stay on. That wasn’t on the plan, and my uncle then got me a job at David Jones, to learn selling, which was a very good idea. In those days to get a job in David Jones as an untrained person in sales you had to be no more that, I think the girls were fourteen or fifteen and the boys maybe sixteen. By this time I was eighteen going on nineteen. And I had an interview an they put me on and I thought I would be selling underclothes and what not. Oh no, where did I go? The silk department. Silk material

by the yard. And I stayed there for two years and I learnt really how to sell. Now a woman would come in, in those days there was no such thing as off the hook, you either bought the material and made it yourself and in that way you could do it without a plan, you could buy the material, go to the other end of David Jones, the other end of the floor and buy a McCall’s Pattern, or you could take it to a dress maker,

and the dressmakers were from amateurs up to very expensive cottiers. And a woman would come in and she wanted a dress, she didn’t know what it was going to look like, she didn’t know what colour it was going to be and she didn’t know how much it was going to cost, and that is selling.

That’s another thing. There was no air conditioning of course, and you wore a three-piece suit. And up until ten

o’clock you were allowed to remove your coat, but not your vest, to clean up and do the dusting. From ten o’clock, mid summer like it is today, you had to wear your coat.

There were three or four major stores. David Jones, Farmers, Mark Foys and then there were quire a lot of other smaller stores. But David Jones would not employ Catholics,

Mark Foys would only employ Catholics, Farmers would employ anybody. And both David Jones and Mark Foys both employed Jews. But I really learnt to sell there. When I first left school and went to Starkey’s, two friends of mine, Allan Wright who was eventually my best man, he died just recently, and

Frank Richardson who was one of the first of my friends to get killed in the war, he died in 41 in the air force, one of them found there was a course at Sydney University called the Diploma of Commerce. You didn’t have to have your leaving, you didn’t have to be matriculated, it was the only course and I used to finish work at say five o’clock at Starkey’s, run down to George Street, get on the tram go to the University, get of the tram, go up the steps, you

know where the stairs are there? Go up there go into the refectory where you had your dinner. Same thing every night, curried sausages and mash. By which time it was five to six, you had to be in your lecture room by six oh five. The lecture was supposed to start but there is always, still is, five minutes. And it started at six oh five, or whatever the hour is. And I did three subjects in the first year, three nights a week.

And the second year five nights a week which was a bit heavy with your social life and doing study. And the third year was three nights a week. And first year I had one post which I passed the second year I had two posts which I passed, and the third year I had three posts but by that time I was in Adelaide so I didn’t finish that. And there is quite a bit about our professor of economics, I won’t go into him.

Dad had very little apart from school. I don’t know what education Mum had, she was a wonderful cook, and in those days no mix master. When she was talking on the phone to Dad, she would have the phone here the basin there, mixing in the bowl. We had a two-storey home, as I say silver plated spoon.

We had a two-storey home, we had two maids. One was a cook and did the downstairs, the other one did the upstairs. My mother and father helped design and build it, this was I n1938, it had an ensuite bathroom.

It is still there you can go and have a look. 13 March Street, still there looks exactly the same, red brick. The only thing that the present owner did,

downstairs you walked into the hall, there was parquetry floor and there was a staircase on the right and there was a small room with a toilet and a hand basin that was called the cloakroom. And you walked in the parquetry on the left there were sliding doors, also parquetry floor which went into the lounge room. And straight ahead there was another door and

the door from the lounge room opened to a huge dining room also parquetry, and it was absolutely magnificent. And you turned and went straight ahead was the breakfast room, and then to the right there was a kitchen which was probably about as big as this room. There was a pantry off the kitchen. I think my mother and father were one of the first to have a refrigerator. Then off that there was a large laundry. The laundry didn’t have a washing machine, the laundry had a gas copper and a couple of tubs.

And the washerwoman used to come in, always Monday, Monday was washday.

In the area? Probably a little bit more modern, it was the last vacant block in the street.

I told you from Narrandera and Leeton and it still went on. After my uncle got sick and sold out in 1948

after I had been up there two years, my eldest son was born in Leeton. That was a thing, born on the 10th of January, my wife was in hospital, beautiful hospital, all brick etcetera, except the maternity section. During the war there was nothing built. Only wartime essential stuff was built and hospitals weren’t essential so the maternity section was a tin shed, a hundred degrees plus Fahrenheit. It was bloody

hot and I used to come home for lunch, rush home, get two or three trays out of the refrigerator with ice and take them over to the hospital for Norma.

Yes they had big dinner parties of course and Mum used to do a lot of cooking. Every Friday we used to have fried fish night and Mum used to put on what she called her friend fish dress which smelt

of oil. And she would go down and she would do the fish, the cook didn’t do that.

I don’t know where she used to buy the fish from. There was a lot of fishermen used to bring fish into Double Bay and sell it on the beach. I don’t know where. But I used to do the odd shopping. Used to get on the bike and it was fairly flat from

where I was to Bellevue Hills shopping centre which hasn’t changed very much. and I used to go to school on my bike. Go up and have a look at March Street because from the northern end of March Street which goes down to Victoria Road, I used to go down there on my bike, and then I would go down Victoria Road and at the top just before Drumalbyn Road I would just stop pedalling and free wheel

and Drumalbyn Road came in. but there was no traffic in those days. I wouldn’t let my kids ride up there today for quids. But I used to walk to school or ride to school by bike. I used to walk when I was at Prep School, I had a bike then too. But we lived very well. I remember Dad said, during the depression, “Gladys we will have to do a bit of scaling back.”

So she looked through and she said, “The only thing I find I can do without is the Women’s Weekly.” That was sixpence a week. But we lived well. Look the maids ate well, the ate what we ate. They didn’t get a great deal of money. They resided there, they had a room to themselves a big room and all of the facilities,

but wages. Look when I went to David Jones I think I was getting somewhat under two pounds a week. When I left I was getting two pound three and six. I was still going at night and David Jones closed at five fifteen in those days, might have been five thirty. And I had to get off at five to get the tram. Used to run from Castlereagh Street,

down Market Street to get the tram. Sometimes I would go through Grace bros, [department store] which was Farmers that’s where Farmers was, or is. And I used to so I spoke to the pay office, we can’t deduct, what you can do is take three quarters of an hour for lunch. So what I used to do was knock off for lunch, go out the back go to the toilet and wash my

hands, then clock off, then I would clock on and go and wash my hands and so on. It was an hour anyway. There was a lot of funny things at David Jones. On the ground floor, on the first floor the three big departments, the original departments were the number three was silk and one-one-three which was artificial silk. It was all in the one department. And the boss there was the lousiest

so and so you ever met. I won’t tell you what his name was or what we used to call him. but the other end, that’s the Market Street end, Market Street and Elizabeth Street. That was cottons and wools and also the pattern department. And on the Castlereagh Street, right on there that was ladies shoes, they were the three big departments. But on the ground floor there was amongst other things, cosmetics and other things,

was ladies silk stockings. Nylons hadn’t come in at that stage. And about every six months or so they would have to get the plumbers in to the ladies staff toilets on the ground floor. And what was there, the toilets were all jammed with stockings. The salesgirls never bought stockings, they used to take pair off go into the toilets and flush them. there is another funny story,

I think it is an urban myth, there was six elevators in David Jones. Three used to go all of the way up and then all floors down. The other three went all floors up and straight down, they were different. well there is a little old lady standing outside one and she wants to go down and the elevator comes, she is standing outside one of them, there was three, she has got a choice. “Going up?” “No down.” “Going up?”

“Going up?” the third time, she said, “Excuse me I have been here for some time and I have seen you go up and I haven’t seen you come down.” He said, “That’s right madam when we get to the top we take it out and bring it down the stairs.” The story is he got fired.

Yes. I always have been, a good talker, a good salesman. I learnt selling, I learnt to sell. People these

days don’t sell. Apart from homes and cars, they’re salesmen. But you go into a store there is no such thing as a sales person.

Yes I would be very polite to her, I would say, “Madam what can I do for you?” and she would say, “So and so.” And you would advise them. she would say,

“ I want it for this.” And I would say, “Well you need three and a half yards.” You learnt these things. I had a very good mentor a woman called Miss Blackwood I think it was, we used to call her Blackie, and when I came back from the war and got married, when I came back from Leeton. I took Norma into meet Blackie, she was still there. She helped me along the line.

One day a gorgeous looking girl came in with the ugliest woman you have ever see. Beautiful girl. I am eighteen, nineteen at this stage. Girls were very fascinating. And so I made a move and Blackie said, “Don’t.” And I said, “Why?” And she said, “She is one of the other girls customers. She is the owner of the biggest brothel in Sydney and that’s one of her girls that she is bringing in to dress.” And she would spend a fortune on clothes.

Another time a very good-looking young woman came in and I was off to serve her and Blackie said, “Be careful she is a shopper.” And I said, “What the hell is a shopper?” They still have them, I don’t know what they are called now, they are employed by David Jones, Grace bros and all of these people, and they come in and if you’re serving behind the counter, they will, this woman came in and took about a

quarter of an hour of my time and she finally bought I think seven eights of a yard of a lining material ,which is the cheapest thing of the lot which meant I had to measure it out, seven eighths, measure it out, she was going to test me. And then on top of that I then had to do, she wanted what was called a lay-by and I had to work out ten percent of the money that she had to pay me. And then she would take that back and report.

She had my number, you had your own book in those days, your own book and you did all of your writing in that book. I was number something, say one two three. And if you didn’t come up to selling in that you had to come up with some good excuses.

When I first started at Starkey

and Starkey Mum used to drive Dad into town and I was the office boy so I had to go to the GPO [General Post Office] and pick up the mail. And the GPO box was in Martin Place and it was 504 AA, and 503 and is still the box number of David Jones,

and Dad and Mum would drop me off in this bloody great Buick. And I would walk in, use my key, get the mail and walk from there up to King Street and walk there and deliver the mail. And then the first job was at nine o’clock, the only rulers you had were round, ever seen one of the rulers they’re round. It was very hard to use once you learnt, except you were using ink

on a pen, steel nib and you dipped it into ink and if you ruled, then you picked up the ruler and wiped it, otherwise you would roll it over and you would get another line. I did that a few times and got into trouble and at nine o’clock as the fellows came in they used to sign the book and at nine o’clock I would write and I copped some bloody abuse. They would come in at five past, “You ruled the bloody

thing off!” all in a days work.

Depending on, see I would go from there, three nights a week I would go from there to an hours lecture usually. Then I would get a tram back from there to King Street. Then I would get a tram from King Street in those days, you know how wide King Street is? There were two lines of trams and

one line of cars each way. Get a tram and it would drop me off at Double Bay. That was tuppence or thruppence I think. Now sometimes depending on how I felt I would get off at the Cross and there was a very nice, I forget the name, but there was a big coffee shop and I would go and have a cup of coffee and help me relax and then go home. But also about 1940

a friend of mine rang me up one day, Bob East whose father was the professional at the Lakes. And Bob and my sister Madge were great friends, always were. He died very suddenly, I think he had cancer, and his wife is very sick, she is still alive. But bob and Madge were very great friends, the whole family was. And Bob rang me up and said, “Do you want to go sailing?” and I said, “What sailing sort of thing?” So he said, “Claude Ploughman has got a yacht and he

is very short of crew.” What had happened, most of the crew had joined up in 1939, 40 and gone away with the 1st AIF [Australian Imperial Forces]. I wanted to join the air force but my parents wouldn’t let me, I think I was lucky. Anyway he picked me up and took me down to Rushcutters Bay and I went on a boat called Morna M O R N A . Sixty-foot long, eighty-foot mast, you will have to translate feet to metres and it was built of solid teak.

And teak is scarcer than hens’ teeth today, you can’t buy teak. It was built in 1914, sailed to Australia, it was bought by a doctor, I don’t know his name, one daughter was called Morna, and one daughter was called Aida. He finished up with a second yacht, that was a schooner, and that was called Aida. And that finished up on blocks, on the runway in Rose Bay for forty years.

Anyway Morna was owned by Sir Claude Ploughman in those days, I don’t think he was sir then. He had bought it from Frank Packer, that’s Kerry’s father and it was a beautiful boat. He was in radios, he made small radios. And he became as I say, Sir Claude Ploughman. Anyhow after about three or four weeks, I took to it like a duck to water, and then there was no crew, and I finished up with about six or eight

fourteen or fifteen year old kids and I was the boson. And he used to let me take the tiller. And that was Saturdays we used to sail. Saturday afternoon I would leave work at David Jones and I would catch the tram to Rushcutters bay and get on the boat. I had to wear white, white shorts and white top, very proper. No shoes of course. And Saturday we used to sail, there used to be races,

but there was no races, and the eighteen footers were huge in those days. They had a crew of about thirteen people the crew of thirteen used to sail in the summer and play rugby league in the winter. And they were all a pretty rough sort of lot the rugby leaguers. And this boat, no one used the main mainsail but this one went up to about sixty feet instead of eighty feet, huge bloody thing.

And we used to go up to windward of them and what they call blanket the feet, and they had got all of the wind and we would come up and take the wind. And they would fall over and I learnt a whole new language.

They were yachts.

Right that was Saturday up around as far as the bridge and that area. Sunday was social day. Get down there about nine o’clock in the morning and

Lady Ploughman would come on, well Mrs Ploughman and she was very social and she had all of these social friends. Some of, one of the nicest was the Swedish consul and a beautiful daughter a bit older than me but a beautiful daughter. Ebba was her name, Ebba De Dardell, De Dardell was the. And they were very nice. But she would bring along some of her social friends.

Same thing every Sunday. We would leave about ten, ten thirty or eleven, whatever the time was we would then sail over to Quarantine Bay, do you know Quarantine Bay? There was a mooring there for Morna.

Yes well there was a mooring over there that Ploughman had planted and it had Morna on it, in fact it is still there. Someone was telling me the other days he hooks up and it is still marked Morna and we would have the same lunch every week. Steamed chicken and salad.

And even the crew joined in. the Morna was beautifully fitted. There was no electricity, no battery, there was a motor a 1914 motor, there were no spark plugs, there was four electrodes that went in and the only on who could start it reasonably quickly was Bob East who got me to go down there. But Claude was such a wonderful sailor that he hardly ever used it. he would come into, coming home in Rushcutters Bay

which even then was quite cluttered, and he would sail a sixty-foot boat in. and I would be on what they call the whiskers, that’s the wires underneath that hold the bow spread. I would be down there, I had two legs in those days and I balanced on the left leg on the wires and I would pick up the mooring with my right foot and hand it in to somebody and that’s how we would go in. we would sail in, I don’t,

very seldom would he start the engine to come in, he was such a perfect sailor. Anyway we would have lunch and the according to who was on board. If Claude wasn’t too happy with them and the wind was right, he was very quietly spoken, he would say, “I think we will take a little turn outside.” And outside meant going about five or six miles, what's that about seven to ten kilometres out to sea. And Sydney Harbour, and

Sydney coast started to disappear and it would be a little bit rough of course and then we would come back. He got his own back.

No we weren’t, look we used to have prayers on Friday night, we never kept a kosher house. We used to have prayers on Friday night. Being Jewish of course you get introduced very early to wine.

And we used to have one, but I don’t remember having wines per se in the house. Certainly not, there were Australians wines so I believe at that stage, particularly from the Barossa area because the Germans had come over after the First World War. Some before, and there was quite a lot of wine but nobody seemed to drink it. I remember one night, I must have been about nine or ten

and Dad took us to a restaurant, it was in King Street near Macquarie Street, called Raeno’s it was a French Restaurant, you went down a set of stairs, and I think we had wine there. I don’t know whether I had it. but there was no bar on having wine or anything, even beer in our house. Dad used to buy a lot of things, because of his connections with

Richardson, he used to get a lot of things wholesale . He used to love Scotch and he used to get Scotch in a two-gallon demijohn, it was an earthenware demijohn which was kept in the garage. And he would get a decanter and a full and I would hold the decanter and funnel and he would turn the demijohn up and fill the decanter. That was his red white and blue scotch.

But that was bought, most of the alcohol and that sort of thing came in through wool houses, like Goldsborough Mort and people, they had the licences or the right to bring in wine or spirits and they came in through the places the sold wool. Goldsborough Mort was one, Pitt, Son and Badgery was another.

I was quite a sickly child. At one stage, I don’t know how old I was but I had haemorrhaging of the kidneys, and the only treatment was rest and plenty of fluids. And I got sick of the barley water, it was home made of course. And I want allowed to put my foot to the ground for something like five or six weeks. And I wasn’t terribly big in those days and Dad used to pick me up and take me to the

toilet or to have a shower or bath and that sort of thing. And I had forgotten all about it, never mentioned it to anybody, didn’t think of it when I went into the army. And then in the early 50’s the company I was with Golden Press, took out an insurance policy, instead of superannuation they used to take out insurance policies on the executives. And I went along for examination, elderly gentleman was the doctor

and he examined me and said, “Ever had any trouble from your kidney?” And I looked at him and I said, “Who are you?” Well we used to go to a trio of doctors in Oxford Street Bondi Junction, Kaye Cunningham and Taylor. And I think he was Taylor or Cunningham, Taylor got killed in the war, I will come to that. Bill Kaye got killed in the war,

he was a magnificent man. He was about six foot five and this first time he walked into the house I looked up. Anyway I was quite a sickly child and all of a sudden around about twelve or thirteen I started to blossom and by the time I was fourteen I was about the same size that I am now, at thirteen I was having every day. We had, the kids used to play with each other, I never had much to do with my sisters

obviously but I had my friends at school. Dad used to try and teach me to spell, he never had succeeded.

Well Madge, one is five years older and the other one is eight years older she turns eighty-nine this year, she still drives and she looks wonderful because she has got scleroderma, do you know what scleroderma is? It is a tightening of the skin. And her face, I am not

joking, has less wrinkles that yours. At eighty-nine. But she is as sick as a dog, has go a bag, everything else is failing. But this bloody scleroderma makes her look like a teenager.

A little bit. My grandfather Herman, he when I was

five, six, seven, later, eight or nine. I used to walk around from where we lived in March Street to Bellevue Hill school. He lived in Birriga Road, I think he might have had tickets or something like that where he didn’t have to pay money. And I would get in the tram with him and we would go on a the Bellevue Hill Tram, and that was a real treat. Do you know

where the Bellevue Hill tram ran? I’ll take you there by car one day. You will never believe it. the Bellevue Hill it came up from Bondi, at Birriga Road, up all of that hill. Then it ran down Edgecliff Road

and it turned left into Queens Street, you know that hill there? And then it turned right onto Moncur and then left at the end of Moncur and right around, do you know the Cutler Bridge? It went over that. Now all of those curves, I don’t know how it did it. Anyway he used to pick me up and we used to have the same seats in the synagogue, the great synagogue in those days, it was one of the few. And he was surrounded by kids of my age

and a bit older, and he was the mentor, everybody remembers Jack Herman. Jacob. And he was a wonderful man. He used to play cribbage on a Friday night with one of his son-in-laws, won’t talk about him, he committed suicide eventually, it wasn’t his, mainly all his fault. And he used to play cribbage with him, ever played cribbage? It’s a wonderful

game, I taught my kids to play cribbage because it taught them to count. You have heard of fifteen two fifteen four, that’s cribbage and they used to fight over every point. And the end of the night they used to write down how many points. And at the end of the year a prize would change hands one cigar.

I used to go of a Saturday and come home, but I wasn’t a great

learner, particularly of languages yes I learnt to say by rote Hebrew, and I learnt to say my Habasha, for literally a portion of the Torah, of the Old Testament. Mine was very interesting, it was all in Leviticus and it was about what you did to the kidney, when you killed an animal what you did to the kidney.

You took the fat off and the whole Goddamn thing. Anyway I learnt that by rote and three of us, myself and two other blokes, did our Habasha, but I got through that all right, but only by memory. Today I can identify a few of the Hebrew letters but I can’t read Hebrew, I don’t want to. At the moment, well after New Guinea I suddenly realised that the scourge of the

world are what I would call the traditional, the what's the word I am trying to think of, of all religions, I mean the Muslims with the, Muslim is a great religion, but the Jews in Jerusalem they would spit on you because your arms are bare. Now that’s not religion.

And I have got them up the road wear these black hats, they don’t believe in contraception, they have got eighteen kids and they have got no jobs, they want the community to look after them. And what they do is they read and re-read the Old Testament, and they say, “This is not right.” And they argue over every point, oh God it has been going on for five thousand years and they have

got nowhere.

Not really, was I different? No. sometimes I got called a Jew but that didn’t matter. There was not much anti-Semitism in Australia until about ’38 when the refo’s as they were called, refugees came here. That’s another story, the refugees came here

from Europe. They were dressed differently. The men had coats that went down to about six inches or whatever it was from the ground. They all had hats on. They were different. half of them couldn’t speak English. They went together in enclaves because they had their friends. A lot of them had brought money out, I don’t know how they did. One bloke I heard, it could have been an urban myth, one bloke brought a lot of

wealth out in his packing cases, instead of having nails he had platinum nails. Whether that’s an urban myth or not I don’t know. But platinum is much the same pallor of nails, silverish. So he had nails manufactured out of platinum and when he got here he cashed them in. whether that’s an urban myth or not I don’t know.

A lot of Jews in Bellevue Hill.

Bellevue hill was very, well in our street number seven was Ralph Simons, they were the plywood people, Ken was a kind of friend, he was my age. And the whole family went very religious, he finished up living in Israel, he died just recently. His sister went over there much earlier, she has lived in Israel all of her life and then next door was

Keith Lazarus, who I still see a lot of , he is a member of the bowling club. He is a couple of years older than me. They were about as religious as I am, maybe. And Keith and I we used to love walking. And I don’t, there are very few things I miss when I lost my leg but one was walking. I don’t remember, there probably were, there were no such things as clubs, bush walking clubs but I would have loved, I loved walking, even in New Guinea

even carrying everything you owned on your back and up those damned hills, but I still enjoyed walking. A lot of blokes different obviously. I am very strong here and strong in the chest and Keith and I, if it rained, we would put on our raincoats and go out. Okay we got wet, so we would come home and have a shower. We’re not made of sugar. Keith and I still

see each other, he married the most lovely person. I don’t see much of them, only at the club. Then there was non-Jewish people next to us, and then there was us. And then there was non Jewish people there, that was when my mother had as good as memory as I have for names, and some people called Carpenter came and Mum could never remember it. And my Dad was very good he used to say there

was a thing he called it pelmanism, pelmanism I don’t know if it is still in the dictionary. But it is an association of ideas. So he said, “Look Carpenter is easy, just remember a carpenter and a joiner.” So from that day on they were Mr and Mrs Joiner. Dad was great on pelmanism. Then people moved in there who were Jewish, they had a son and a daughter and they are still alive. Lenny Stich. He was

linen importer. Very rich man. He did the right thing, before he moved out, he had a large block of land left over and he built another two storey home and sold them both. So he is very well off. Do you know that block of unit on the corner of New South Head Road and Dover Road? Very expensive, they live there, they are well into their

eighties or early nineties. And they potter around, they get around. And then next door was the Cullen’s. Doug and Geoff, Doug was a doctor. Very nice bloke. Geoff was an accountant, didn’t get on with him, they were a little older than me. And Doug was a paediatrician, heart doctor and our eldest son was born with a hole in his heart. And

Norma found out in the first six months, because whenever our three children were born she took them to the paediatrician to run the rule over them and he found this, what they called a murmur in those days. And I was at a party, Peter is fifty now so this would be forty odd years ago, Peter would have been three or four. And I got talking to Doug and I said, “Peter has got this hole in the heart what's going to happen?”

and he said, “Look Harold at this time we don’t know. by the time he gets to about thirty, thirty-two he is going to be in trouble, God only knows what will happen by that time.” And God did know because by that time open-heart surgery was one, so Peter went to a cardiologist and he

sent him in to have a valve put in and he had a choice of pig, which incidentally Jews will use because it is nothing to do with eating. You can still use pig not eat it. But this is changing the subject. Pig, metal or something else, plastic. So he chose the metal and that lasted just on twenty years and two years ago he had to have another one.

So when they took the other one out and put the new one in, and when they took the old one out he took it home and gave it to his eight-year-old daughter and she took it to school for show and tell.

I can’t answer that question. We were very concerned during Munich which was 1938 because we happened to be in America.

Coming back on our trip, half way back on our trip when Munich was on, and we didn’t know what if war was declared, what would happen to us. Five of us would be marooned in America, well that’s another story. We got back okay. And the next year, I was still nineteen, it doesn’t matter, now I was seventeen,

yes I was only seventeen in 39 and I had just started work and I wanted to join the air force and I was told to go to buggery, the family wouldn’t be in it. And I joined I think the next year, 1940, I was at the university, that’s when I joined the SUR [Sydney University Regiment], I though at least I can carry on my training I had had at school, carry on in the fair

dinkum army. That’s when I was in the SUR, Sydney University Regiment. And we used to do our parades every couple of weeks or every month or whatever it was. And by this time a lot of my friends had gone overseas. Anyway Frank Richardson had died. Gavin Riley was still alive, you wouldn’t know there was a famous

Australian artist called Virgil Riley, Sydney man. Gavin was his son and Gavin used to rock all of the girls because his father had been divorced and got remarried again and he would be sitting there and he would say, “Oh gee the night my Dad got married, we had a wonderful time that night.” Because of course was a no no in those days. Anyhow he was

thoroughly over indulged. His father bought him a 1938 I think it was, Chev [Chevrolet] coupe. And Frank Richardson hadn’t joined the army at that stage, his parents had a house down at Woy Woy, and one time we went down in Gavin’s car. And you waited about two hours to cross the Hawkesbury River and from Hawkesbury River it was a very dangerous windy road. And there was five of us and the keg,

Five-gallon keg in the Chevy [Chevrolet]. Two in the dickie seat in the back in the open and three under cover. And we were going up and the bloke in front of us started to more or less dare us to pass him. No he wanted to pass us, I forget who was driving. So the four of who weren’t driving, we were doing the bit out of the side, of course kids

don’t do that these days.

Every report was the same, could do better.

It was a necessary evil I think, I enjoyed the sport side, football particularly, I wasn’t much good at cricket but I was good at football and rugby of course.

And I enjoyed the company of boys and growing up, I don’t think you thought about it.

In the Prep School you stayed in the one room of course, but in the main school you went from room to room. And corporal punishment was one. I had my share of whacks across the hand, I don’t think it hurt me, I am not screwed up.

It is bloody ridiculous that your own child you can’t give it a whack and say, “Don’t do that!”

Yes I… Scots was very badly run, I will say that. You had no mentor to tell you what to learn you just picked it yourself. And I just picked I did mathematics which I loved,

I did chemistry which I loved, I did physics which I loved, I dropped Latin, French couldn’t handle it. I had to do English but that was a compulsory subject. And because I knew what my future was going to be I took bookkeeping and bookkeeping.

Right the calculator. I had a thing called an obner [?], I finished up I bought one in the ’70s, a little machine about that big, it had a handle and you could probably still buy one, it had numbers on it, one to zero I think, and little levers ,

and if you wanted to multiply one, two three, you set your levers one, two , three and if you want to multiply that by one, click over, two, click over three, and the answer came up.

Down the bottom there was, numbers came up you could see the numbers. Anyhow my partner we were always buying things second hand, this was in the last business I was in.

He bought one that was electric. Anyway when we had the fire, both of these machines you could seem them after the fire in the office, there was a mass of wheels and cogs on the floor. There was also a thing called a comptometer, now you had to be an expert. The women used the comptometer. It was about that wide, that deep and that high. And it had rows of one to zero

and a good comptometer operator could do everything on it, multiply, divide, add the whole thing. And you have never seen anything like it, they went dot dot dot, the only thing about it was that they were heavy. And in the second half of the year at Starkey’s on a Friday I used to go down to Hoyt’s which was, do you know where the old Regent Theatre was? Just about opposite there next to the Century Theatre,

do you remember that? Do you remember the Century Theatre? There were three, the Regent, Century and Plaza Theatres. Century and Plaza were on the other side of the road to the Regent. And above the century there was an office and there was a joint audit that they used to do on a Friday and I used to go down there with this audit. And the Starkey comptometer operator would be there. And at the end of the day

Friday night to go back and get paid they would pack up and guess who carried the comptometer? I think it was actually a hat case. It was about that big and it was bloody heavy. And I used to walk from there right along York Street to King Street every Friday night carrying this comptometer, so I know what a comptometer is. There were no electronics. Ordinary typewriters. Rules, you had to

the balance sheets you started off with the seventh copy, and when you handled that you got to the sixth copy and when you were really expert you got up to the number one copy. Now you had to use these rulers and use red ink of course and one the nib, and you had to do perfect lines. And there was, what was her name? Pash. Miss Pashley called Pash.

She was a typical old maid, oh she was a terror. If you put one line out of space you would have to do the thing again, they would do about four copies with carbon paper. Yes they had carbon paper but Starkey’s was so far behind, with the statements that went out to be paid that there was no duplicate. And they had a book about this big with very

fine tissue paper in it and you had got wet blotting paper, I forget the exact order, the statement and then the tissue paper that was going on and the wet blotting paper and you put it in the press. And you were lucky if the statement didn’t get all smudged. Why they didn’t have duplicate they had carbon paper. But in those days when I went into business, when I came back from

Leeton in 48, you were inundated every second person coming in, hawking, selling carbon paper. Where is carbon paper these days?

Well only typewriters and the typewriters were in the back office. There were three offices for the three partners and then there was the entrance where I was. And another few offices back there

for the various account clerks, not clerks, I suppose. The partners didn’t go out and do the audits, the auditors. But there was a very tragic thing, they did the Leeton and Narrandera audits, that’s how we all got, Dad did Dad’s books and Mum’s books etcetera. And they used to go down to Leeton and Narrandera, and the two blokes would fly down, Narrandera was the head office,

Leeton, although it was just as big as organization, everything was down in Narrandera, the head office was there the secretary and whatever.

Of Richards and Company. Head office of Starkey was in Grace Building which was owned by Grace Bros, and it was a real dead duck in those days. Except,

this was 1939, we had a lot of Japanese and they were all buying and selling ,wool classers and so on and they were all eighth floor, top floor and you had a wonderful view of the harbour.

Grace building which then the repat [Repatriation] took it over after the war,

on the corner of King York and Clarence, still there.

Spying. Technically they were businessmen, but in retrospect they were obviously spying. They knew the whole layout of the harbour, they could see Garden Island they could see everything.

I used to see them in the lift sometimes

and they were genuine businessmen allegedly, but nobody gave it a thought in those days. 1939 when I was there anyway I wasn’t there in 40 or 41. Next question.

I can’t remember exactly,

one was an accountancy. One was economic geography, which was a wonderful subject. I hated geography at school, but I loved economic geography. Geography at school you had to draw a map and say, “This is where so and so is.” But economic geography you knew where peanuts were grown right? Accountancy. I forget, the last

year probably the worst subject ever, what's the name as the damn thing? Economics. And there is no such thing, nobody can tell what economics is. It is a dreadful subject, there is no rhyme or reason to it and they are all wrong. One economist will say this and another will say something else and they are both wrong.

I forget all of the subjects, going back sixty years. As I said I passed, never got a diploma, so there are subjects not there. When I came back I decided to go back and do it and I wrote to them and they said, “Yes if you do the economics exam we’ll pass you.” Because I got three posts and by that time I was in Adelaide

and I got the books out in Baulkham Hills and the boys were paying poker. “Come and play.” “Oh no I am studying.” “Don’t be silly you can do that tomorrow.” Meanwhile that never came.

Just plain clothes and a black gown. Do you know Sydney University at all? You know where the refectory is? And you know the little

road there? Well when sometimes Dad used to let me come home and get the car and I would park there. Drive in around the, did one exam, one year we did the exams in the great hall, what a great edifice that is. And you know behind the great hall, there is a quadrangle, if I remember correctly, Fishers is the library, Fishers is down the other end, am I right?

Well in that area in the towards the refectory end there were some rooms there, we did most of our lectures there. I think most of them were chemistry in those days.

It was a straight eight Buick, a seven seater. Have you ever seen a seven seater? It had an engine, and I am not joking, the bonnet was from here to

there and then there was the front seat where you could put three people because there was no thing in the middle. And then there was a space and you got in the back seat and the back seat was there and it would fit three people and then there were tow dickie seats that you pulled down and the back came up and that was a seven-passenger car.

Cloth interior, Dad always had navy blue,

only one colour. But cars in those days were so different from now. About every eighteen months Dad used to get a mechanic to come in and do what he called a de-coke and a valve grind. Now you don’t hear of it these days, but they had what they called an overhead valve engine. General Motors were all overheads Ford were always side valves, a different process. I don’t know what they are today,

no fuel injection of course you had a carburettor, and the carburettor had to be cleaned out because the fuel wasn’t as clean as it is today, didn’t have the octane rating that it has today. And Dad used to have a de-coke and valve grind about every six months. And the valves were about that big and you would see, they would have carbon burnt on them.

Very few had two, most of the reasonably wealthy people had cars. But if you go through Bondi and Paddington not a garage in sight. And also do you know down where Solomon Road is? What's the next one across is it Dalfour? Whatever the next one is.

You’ll see down there, there is rows and rows of well they’re units now, they were flats. Three storeys high, not one of them has a garage. Now all of that rea when I was very young, about six when we moved from Bondi to Bellevue hill, that was a Chinese garden and all of that flat area there they used to grow vegetables for sale.

I don’t know where they used to sell them,

but of course Mum used to get a grocery order. And of course you would get half a dozen eggs in a paper bag. A pound of sugar, weighed it, put it into a paper bag.

I think at one of the stores in Bellevue Hill. There was no such thing as a general. If you wanted to shop for clothing or anything like that you went to town. You went to the city

and went to David Jones, Mum had an account at David Jones, you would have an account at David Jones, and you would walk in, didn’t have a card or any identification, you would say, if they wanted to put it on, they would say, “S. J. Herman.” If I was selling I would ring up and say, “Yes, Mr Herman that’s okay Mr Herman.” And if you bought something for cash, say it was three pound and you gave a five-pound note, you would put it in a tube and send it down the tube.

And the cash would come back. In Narrandera we had tubes, in Leeton which was a much younger building, they didn’t put tubes in they put the old wires, have you ever seen the wires? Well say my department is here over about the office is a cash section and all of the wires go up there. Now you would give me your five-pound, and you had to get change,

I would put it in a little container, screw it into this thing, pull rubber up the wire, click it would stop up the other end. A girl would take it out there, see the docket, there was one pound two and six change, put the change in and just click it and it would come down by gravity.

We had one in Narrandera, I was in the office for twelve months, I remember this one very well, that was on the cigarette counter and I

can confidently say it never balanced. Every night never balanced. But see with groceries, tinned groceries yes you picked those. But any ham or beef or what they were all behind a fly proof room and you would go there and say I want a half a pound of bacon and they wrapped that up and I think you paid for that there,

no I don’t know how that worked. No they had a thing, anyhow you paid for it and they would open the thing and give you the parcel so the flies didn’t get in.

I don’t know about Narrandera I think Narrandera would have been the same. No such thing as self-service or anything like that. There were so many people employed. We had forty or fifty people.

But the departments that didn’t do well were women’s fashions, but men’s fashions did very well and if a man wanted a suit I have measured them and picked the cloth and sent the measurement and the number of the cloth to a company down in Sydney and some weeks later it would come back half made suit, and he would try it on, and I had no training for it but you soon learnt.

Try it on, make adjustments to it and then send it back and a couple of weeks later a suit would come back. There was one German of German descent, he spoke very poor English. And most people used to come into the store to change cheques, they wouldn’t use the banks because the banks had given them such a lousy deal during the depression and they still remembered. And they would come to the store. Uncle Rob, or whoever designed it did one good thing, because if they

wanted cash they would have to go right to the back of the store, that’s where the cash office was. That’s where the office was, well it is a logical place to put the office. But all of the teachers used to get paid by cheque, they would come in, they wouldn’t go to the bank, and they wouldn’t buy anything, they would cash the cheque. But this old German bloke he used to come in and buy a pair of socks and handkerchief or something, and he would give you the chequebook and ask you “How much?”

and you would say “Five pound.” He would write out the cheque for five pound, turn it around

End of tape

In Leeton and Narrandera? Yes it was impacted but as I said we kept on going and not only us, but all of the country stores did the same, without the country stores the country would have just died. The banks,

all they were doing was repossessing and doing what? But the country stores if they had a good year they would pay something. They wouldn’t pay everything back. Most of the things that they bought. The didn’t buy luxuries, they bought essentials like food, tools that sort of thing. Essential to keep them going. And not only Richards but every country store that you can imagine did exactly the same thing, for

exactly the same reason. Without the country stores, without feeding the people they are just going to walk off and leave the farms and it would have been worse. They were lucky, they weren’t getting good prices but they were at least growing things and they were probably grew a lot of stuff for themselves. I mean a rice farmer would have a couple of paddocks where he would plant tomatoes and things that he could eat.

Well Leeton had a variety, there is tow kinds of soil in Leeton and you can drive along a road and you can see where one type finishes and one type starts. One is a very sandy soil which is wonderful for fruit trees. The other is a very clay soil and that’s good for any crops, particularly rice. Now rice uses a

huge amount of water, and rice growing was always very controlled. Because say, most of the big farms were five or six hundred acres, otherwise what they would do, they would plant five hundred acres of rice and then they couldn’t use the land for another five or six years. So what the WC&IC,

the Water Conservation and Irrigation Committee, did was they said the maximum you can grow I think was sixty acres on that, you would not use that sixty acres again to grow rice for another five or six years. Which meant, if you had a five hundred acre farm you could rotate your crops. I think the year after the rice was taken off was just left fallow and then lucern or something like that to regenerate,

rice takes everything out of the ground. Australia can produce rice, even though our wages are much higher, we can produce rice much cheaper than the natives can do it because okay they’re not paying wages, their crops as not as good they are dependant on rainwater and if they don’t get rain they are not getting the water.

And they just don’t get the crop that Australia can get. But it was very much controlled, so much so that in my time there was one farmer down there, this bloke tried to cheat and they used to do it sometimes from the air, they would know what farm, what his acreage was and the next paddock was growing rice. So they would come along and measure it

and they said, “See that paddock turn the water off.” So he turned the water off and a couple of weeks they came back still, “Oh it must be the yabbies, they have dug holes through the” anyway what they did, they just turned his whole water off, he lost his whole crop. The whole sixty acres.

Yes. And my cousin was also, he made it very difficult for me. He was an

absolute fool and he made it very difficult for me. And my uncle didn’t help, and my uncles wife well I just won’t talk about her. She was a very difficult person and she had some idea of who should take over. But my uncle was very sick, he had a blood pressure of two hundred plus, he was born in 1900 so I always knew his age, but in ’47

’48 he had a blood pressure of over two hundred he had what they called a sympathetic nerve operation, I don’t know what it is but the snipped some nerve, his blood pressure did go down, but he died in ’53 or ’54, only fifty years old. The blood pressure got him.

Two. My namesake Harold Herman, my fathers brother obviously.

And he was on Gallipoli and it was in November just before the evacuation, he got wounded and he was evacuated to a ship, I presume it was a hospital ship I don’t know. He died on board the ship, he was twenty-three years old and he was buried at sea. My mother had three brothers, Clifford Richards,

he joined the AIF and he was in Europe he was in France, I don’t know his age, I could look it up I have got it on the computer. And he and, I just found, we always thought that he was one of three off a match. Now you probably haven’t heard of this but in the First World War, after the war no ex-digger would ever light three cigarettes off the one match and the reason was, very true, it had happened,

we always thought he died from that. In the trench they would light three fellows cigarettes. They would light the first, light the second, and by the time the third man came they had a bead on that man. Third off the match was supposed to be unlucky. We always thought it was that but anyway this friend of mine in Canberra came up and there were three men, three of his mates, they were in a shell hole

and a shell landed on them and exploded. She knows, she has told me where the graves are. That was in the First World War and in the Second World War do you want me to go through that or?

No. My father was married of course, Joan was

born in 15, he married in 14 and she was born in 15 and he was too sick to go anyhow. in the early part of the century there was some sort of operation they had and they short circuited his stomach and he finished up he was a wiry little man, never grew, I think he was about four stone dripping wet with his Wellington boots full of water.

He was very light, a very small man. Not physically small, but very wiry. He should have been a lawyer, he had a marvellous brain but because his father had to come up to Sydney and start the finance business there wasn’t enough money to go through law or anything else, and he finished up a financier which he hated. His friend was a lawyer, became a barrister, bloke called

Leonard Abrams, brilliant barrister, KC [King’s Counsel] in those days which is a QC [Queen’s Counsel], KC is gone now, but he was a KC. And he was one of the few legal men in Australia that also had an accountancy backing and he and a group of barristers and accountants were over in Perth in 1938 on some sort of a conference,

I think, it will be in the history somewhere, to do some sort of a superannuation scheme for everybody in Australia. And they were flying back from Perth in a DC3 which was the only plane in those days, and they were coming into Melbourne, and I can even remember then name of the plane, the plane was called the Kiama, and they hit a mountain and they were all killed, that was in 1938.

Yes it was military training .we had rifles, .303 rifles the same rifle that I had in the army. Yes we fired them and I was a reasonably good shot. If I say so myself.

Well it was .303 was a very old rifle, it was used in the

First World War, I don’t know if it was used before, its first title was a Lee Enfield Short Lee Enfield point .303, point .303 of an inch was the size of the bullet or the bore of the bore. The bullets came in metal clips of five and you pulled the bolt back and you pushed the clip into the thing and then

top and then you could get another clip and put another clip in and push the top, so it held ten rounds. Then you would push the bolt forward and that would push the top one into the firing chamber and you put the volt down and then you were ready to fire.

Complete training, same sort of training that I received and gave later in the army.

At Scots? I think it was once per week. We used to get dressed in the kilts, my father used to say I was the best Jewish looking Scotsman he had ever seen. And believe me kilts, we used to wear kilts only for dress of course in the

camps, Liverpool in December is no place to wear a kilt, and don’t ask what you wear under them.

It’s a black watch kilt, proper kilt, terribly hot, proper jacket. The whole bit, it is a black watch tartan.

Well you could get out of it I think.

I don’t know about then, but Peter my youngest sons step son was at Scots and he got out of doing the military training because I think he was doing some sort of theatrical training and it clashed. So he got out of the military because of that. But he is now, he done

three years at New South Wales, some sort of course, I am not quite sure.

In the army? Reasonably. In the cadets? Much the same. We had NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers] who were school boys. We had cadet officers. The head of the place was an old major from the First World War, remember this was not that long after the First World War, Major,

what was his name. He also taught, well tried to teach accountancy.

Yes I did. I think I wrote that, I said I enjoyed the military discipline and the military life.

Oh yes, when I went into the army I had to learn nothing. Well that’s not quite true,

just before I went in full time I got called up to do a junior leaders course at Mona Vale, that was early December 41, and then I was taught map reading and what they call tewt’s T U T S. Technical Exercises Without Troops T E W T S. And that’s a

Tactical Exercise Without Troops., in other words you work something out on paper. And that’s only as a junior leader, I was a lance corporal, not even a corporal. I was down there I think, if you remember if you have the story, I was down there I think when Pearl Harbour was bombed. Of course that was Sunday there, Monday here, and of course when we learnt on Monday that night, the army in its wonderful wisdom got us into

our SD’s Service Dress, that’s winter dress, very heavy serge, you can wear it in winter and still sweat. And we got into that and they gave us our rifles and they gave us ammunition, and they gave us blank ammunition, just goes poof and all it does is make you rifle dirty and there is no bullet. And we had to walk up and down Mona Vale Beach in the

dark all night on patrol, they wouldn’t even trust us with live ammunition, the army.

No never.

Because the war was on then, I didn’t join that until 1940. The war started in 1939 and I joined the

SUR in 40.

Oh yes. I mentioned before when we were in Europe, when we flew to Paris, being Jews there, this would be 1938, before August because we left Britain in August

so May, June, July that area. The only place we went to was France, we wouldn’t go to Germany or any place like that being Jewish.

Well there was a little bit of information in the paper. Dreadful things happened to refugees.

The Germans loaded a whole lot of families onto a ship, quite well documented, I think there was a movie made of it. And they sent this ship and no country would take them including America, and they went back to Germany and went to the concentration camp.

April 38.

Sydney Hobart, overnight at Hobart while they loaded the apples because while this ship wasn’t air conditioned as far as the passengers were concerned, it was a modern ship and had a refrigerated hold so they filled it with apples. From there to Melbourne, during the day, day in Melbourne. From Melbourne the Adelaide, day in Adelaide. From Adelaide to Perth, day in Perth. Perth to

Ceylon or Colombo and we had a following sea and the Orchides was known, even then, it would roll in dry dock, and it went like this for about five days. Well you get used to it. and there was a rule, when you left port, when we left port in Hobart we didn’t dress for dinner, when we left port

in Melbourne we didn’t dress for dinner, we dressed for dinner every other night, only the nights you left port you didn’t dress for dinner. And dress was a tuxedo for men and an evening dress for women. And my mother had a cabin trunk, have you ever seen a cabin trunk? My mother had a cabin trunk, Joan had a slightly smaller cabin trunk and Dad Madge and I we had cases. And when we got to New York, we were going across by train,

and what we had all organised was to have a case each, and the rest of it was shipped through hopefully to come onto the Mariposa or Monterey or whatever it was in Los Angeles and it did. It was all there when we got on.

No well yes to Los Angeles but via Canada,

through the Rockies, we stayed at Banff. Dad played golf on what they call the mile high, played golf up there. And Norma and I went back, we did an Alaskan trip, and part of the trip was coming from Vancouver to Banff by train. And on the train we were choofing along and I think there were about eight or nine couples, run by NRMA [National Roads and Motorists’ Association] beautiful,

best trip we ever did. And there were three or four, half a dozen Canadians in the club car, the night after we had had dinner. And they were train enthusiasts. And Harold, always backward, I said I did this trip in 1938, when it was a steam train, and they were asking so many questions, train buffs, now of course it is a diesel etcetera. Banff was exactly the same,

I think the people that worked there just looked the same because Banff was only opened in the summer season, I don’t know whether it opens, it might open for skiing I ma not sure, but ninety percent of the staff who work there are university students, so they just look the same. And then when we went, back in ’38, we went for a day tour by car to Lake Louise, it was not very far away. Have you seen photographs of Lake Louise?

It is gorgeous. Anyway when Norma and I did it we stayed overnight at the château at Lake Louise and the window from our room looked over the most magnificent lake and mountain country, you have got no idea. Anyway back to ’38, went to Vancouver, went by boat from Vancouver to Seattle,

Madge and I were given the lovely task of getting, everywhere we went we had to have two taxis, well with luggage for five, and five people you had to have two taxis. So Madge and I were sent with the taxi, “Stay there don’t move until we come.” I think it was about three minutes before the train finally left, the others came and Madge and I were furious. “Where have you been?” “Oh the taxi driver insisted on

showing us Seattle.” Madge and I all we saw was the railway station. From Seattle to San Francisco, three or four days in San Francisco, best hotel was in Francis right in the square, from there by train down to Los Angeles, and coming down, I remember this very clearly. Coming down on the train part of the road, after the mountains, you’re down flat,

and part of the road runs parallel with the train. And we didn’t know how fast we were going, and there was a couple of coppers on motorbikes and we clocked them, you could see the marks they were doing a hundred miles an hour, on a motorbike. Miles an hour. The train was doing exactly the same .stayed at the Ambassador Hotel which was beautiful in those days. It was until Bobby Kennedy got assassinated there.

And one trip that Norma and I did it was a shock to me because it was run down it was horrible. But the big thing there was they had a night club called the Coconut Grove, I am sixteen of course. On the Saturday night we all get dressed up, tuxedo and all, I go down sixteen, probably having a beer or two, I don’t know what the alcohol rules were in those days, as I say, my parents were very broad minded at that time.

And my uncle, Uncle Cecil had joined us and he was a real Aussie, used to go over to America because he was sick and the only doctor that could help him was in America so he went there every couple of years. And we waited there, and I don’t know how it came on, but a very attractive young woman came and joined us. Her name was Phyllis Marie Arthur and she was a newspaper reporter,

I don’t know how she came along but she became a member of the party. And then Caesar Romero, do you remember Creaser Romero was there and he was brought over and introduced and he danced with my sister Joan, she didn’t wash her hands for a week. She thought it was wonderful. Anyhow they had a magician there and he had an open keg, round keg nothing on the back, puts piece of paper on both sides, puts a skillet in and he is getting drinks out,

“Scotch? Who wants and scotch?” Anyhow my Uncle Cecil good old Aussie voice, “How about a rum punch?” just ignored. “How about a rum punch?” Just ignored. Third time, “How about a rum punch?” and the bloke turned around and said, “Do you think I am a magician.” But I have often wondered you know, sixteen year old sitting in the coconut grove, and then from there we came home.

Europe only apart from a week in Paris, went to Versailles and the various places.

Well because we were with General Motors agents Dad had a letter and we went to the Vauxall which is General Motors in England and they lent us a car, there was no such thing as hire cars, they didn’t exist.

What people used to do, if they went overseas, it took six weeks to get over there, there were no planes. Oh you could make it less you could get off in France and go by train, but to do the whole but. Anyway Dad took this in and what people used to do was buy a car from somebody on condition in so many weeks they would sell it back at a price, so that was the deal. So General Motors loaded us a

Vauxall, a seven passenger Vauxall, so we all loaded up and did the South of England, down through South Hampton, along Lands End and up through Devon and Cornwall. Had a wonderful trip and then Joan got sick, and then all of us moved out of London, and we moved to a place called Selsdon Park, it is in

Surry somewhere, nobody seems to know where it is. Magnificent hotel with an eighteen hole golf course. And we were there and so Dad Madge and I did a trip, because Joan wasn’t well and Mum wouldn’t leave her alone, we did a trip up north and we went to the lakes district which was magnificent. You been to England at all? Been to the lakes district? Oh gorgeous. And then we went to

through Edinburgh, been to Edinburgh? Up in the castle, did the whole bit. And then from there we went to a place called Auchterarder, you would know it better as Glen Eagles but the town is Auchterarder. So I was sixteen, I had swung a gold club but I wasn’t a member of a golf course. And they had three courses there, the Kings, Queens and Princes, and Madge was a very good golfer but she wasn’t allowed on the kings because it was men only.

The queens was mixed and the princes, I don’t know what I think it was only a nine hole. So Dad said, “Come one we’ll buy some clubs,” and I went with him and I played a reasonable eighteen holes. Anyhow the next day Madge and Dad went up and they played the princes, nobody knows where Auchterarder is.

Well we didn’t see Europe. Apart from Paris, Paris was all swinging, Paris was Paris, Paris was Paris right up until the day before it was occupied.

No when war was declared I was at Starkey’s. War was declared I

think September ’39 I am not sure, and that was toward the end of my first year at Starkey’s. I had started my first year at university. That was 39, and 40, I don’t know whether it was the beginning of ’40 or the middle that I joined the SUR [Sydney University Regiment] because things looked like they were getting a bit serious. And then in ’41,

December, I was still at David Jones and I got called to do this course at the end of November it would have been, it started early December. There you are can you hear it?

Yes I think I can. I heard it in the evening. I have written

this I think, I don’t know whether it is true or not I would have to check this, the day war was declared and what time it would be in Sydney and what time it was in Europe. I had an idea it was a Friday evening, I mean not being religious Friday night is at home. But Friday night Frank Richardson, Allan Wright and myself used to go to a gymnasium in George Street,

between King and Market, just down from where Dymocks is. Next door was Bjelke Petersen, they were the big health people in those days, it was just a small gym, used to go up there, and they had bars non the wall and we used to do lifts on the wall and that sort of thing, trying to keep fit and we were very fit young men. And then we would have about half an hour wrestling

on the mats and that sort of thing. And then we would go down, I think there was a place next door that sold pure orange drink, lovely orange drink. We all liked our beer. I didn’t like beer I drank it, I used to always think, finished up thinking that the only way I would drink beer is to get a glass go to the toilet and through it down and eliminate the middle man, it just went through me. It blew me up, about two or three middies

I was full. Not drunk, but full in the stomach. But then later I learnt to drink whiskey, and as you can see I like my whiskey.

We went to the gymnasium I think after we heard, and we probably discussed it. I don’t know that anybody had made any decisions, Frank and Allan and I were all going to the

university together at that time. And I think Frank dropped out that year and he joined the air force but he was killed in ’41, so he was very early. I looked up his war record. And I lost track, he had two sisters, and one was as far as I know at that time not married, one was Treasure, I don’t know where they got that from, the other was Peg, Peg married

and I never knew her husbands name. Franks father was also Frank Richardson and he had a milk business in this area, and in those days it was all horse and cart. And we would go to a dinner or a party on a Saturday night and Frank would be all dressed up in his tuxedo or whatever. He had more use of his father’s car than any of us and so he was the driver in most cases.

So he would drop Allan and I off, this time it was about one o’clock or something like that, go straight up to the dairy, get out of his tuxedo and get the horse and cart and go out and deliver milk.

Look it was inevitable. I mean Chamberlain in ’38, ‘Peace in our Time’ that was a lot of garbage. Any thinking person

knew that it wasn’t going to stop Hitler. I mean he had broken every treaty, every promise he had ever made. Nobody knew at that stage the horrors as far as the Jews, we knew the Jews were being persecuted but we didn’t know, nobody knew until 45, when the war ended. Nobody knew until the Americans and

the Brits opened up the horror chambers what had happened. Everybody talks about the Jews and there were four or five million Jews but anybody that didn’t fit in. homosexuals, gypsies, people they didn’t like, you know they didn’t like which way they parted their hair. And if somebody said, a Nazi said, “Put them in a

concentration camp.” And I don’t know if you have read much about it. Doctor Mangles, operating on people without anaesthetics, oh, it is unbelievable that human beings can do that. Well you don’t have to go past the Japanese.

Oh yes. We had a radio, only one, which brings me to something, getting away from the war for a minute if you don’t mind, today everything except land and housing is cheaper, you work it out on an hourly basis. Apart from land and housing I will give you

that. Not every house had a radio. Most houses only had one, very few had more than one. Some of them had gramophones we were very wealthy, we had an electric gramophone. And a gramophone was great, you had a seventy-eight RPM [Revolutions Per Minute], there was a ten inch and a twelve inch, the ten inch was the top one and that lasted three and a half minutes. Dad love symphonies and he bought the twelve inch and about every

four minutes he would have to get up turn the record over, put a new needle in and sit down again. And the symphony that way instead of going for an hour and a half, would go on two hours. He would have fallen over backwards to have a whole symphony or a couple of symphonies on one CD [Compact Disc]. Much better tone, sit back and relax. TV’s when TV’s first came out, you paid five and six hundred

pound for a TV, black and white. Today you can get a colour TV, so much better, wages are so much more and you can get a colour TV for what two hundred and fifty, three hundred dollars? Plus the fact, when I went to, when I started with Little Golden Books in 1948 we were paying the packers to do the work,

we were paying about four pound ten, nine dollars.

Are you talking about the war?

I don’t know whether we listened to the news a great deal, I think I used to read it in the paper. We probably would have turned the radio on, wireless on sorry. We would have turned the wireless on at that stage to get the news yes.

I know during the war we used to listen to the radio or the wireless, whatever you like to call it. the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation], particularly the comedian. Vic Moore, ever heard of Vic Moore? Its that man again. That was one of the, I think they were Goons, they would be sent over in those days, the cricket, this is

before the war, when the cricket was played there was no direct radio with the cricket as far as Australia and England is concerned and they used to send cables over to the Sydney radio station and the bloke there would say, “So and so bowled” and he would hit a piece of wood, you have heard this all before.

And outside you know where the synagogue is in Elizabeth Street? Well next door to that is Consolidated Press, I don’t know whether you know that. That’s where the Telegraph, the Telegraph was a morning paper, owned by Packer and it was printed there. And I used to watch the printing press in Castlereagh Street, the hot metal and the linotypes were all under there and that’s where the paper was made. And it came out,

those big, leave it, no let it go.

Keep going, that’s my mail.

That’s where all of the printing was done, rotary presses and they were all metal pressed and hot metal and people would get badly burnt with the hot metal and that’s all gone, there is not such thing as hot metal anymore, the newspaper today is all photographed, all what they call a litho lithographic.

Probably yeah I think I wanted to join the air force and I went home and said, “I want to join the air force.” And I was told, “Got to buggery.” So I was put off very quickly.

Oh glamour, plus the fact that from that high I loved aircraft. Always have, always will. I know all about aircraft, I have read about them and I love them.

I was too young, my family didn’t want to see their only son killed. I think they were protective.

Well as I say I had been trained two years at least at Scots and by that time a lot of the men had gone away in the 2nd AIF, I think I wrote this but I

will just say it again. A lot of the 2nd AIF were people who had never had a job. This was ’39 and the Depression didn’t really end until ’33 or ’34 and jobs were very hard to get. And there were a lot of men who had left school say in ’29 and had never had a job. They had no training, they had no income and they

saw this as a great adventure. Let me tell you this breaking into that, I have spoken to other people and in the army you knew others were going to be killed but it was never going to be you. Killed or wounded never you. And a friend I think I have mentioned, I am a member of the Masonic lodge and it is named Harold Herman after the original Harold Herman, it is the only lodge in the district that is named after a

man who was not a member of the Grand Lodge. He was only a very young mason. And the lodge was named after him after the Second World War, well it was formed the same year I was born, ’22, and was dedicated to fallen brethren. And our big night is obviously Anzac [Australian and New Zealand Army Corps] night and not last year but the year before we had a sergeant who was ex-permanent army, and Australian

of course, and he had been in lots of campaigns, been in Nam and I think he is the chairperson or whatever it is of the Nam vets. And he gave a very short lecture, about quarter of an hour. And he said two things, “I have never met a coward.” That was the main thing, he went on with that. But afterwards I was talking to him

and I said, “I had a feeling that others were going to be killed or wounded but it was never going to be me.” And he said, “We all had that.” I said, “Were you ever scared?” and he said, “All of the time.” I won’t use the words he said.

It was more a fun thing really, except once a year you went to a three month camp.

In around about ’40, I think it was ’40, they brought in compulsory training. And they were what they called the chocos [chocolate soldiers sl. for militia], they were called chocos because I think it was Gladys Moncrieff or one of them there was a musical called the Chocolate Soldiers. And because they weren’t AIF the AIF looked down on them and they called them chocos, chocolate soldiers.

And the difference was in New South Wales they had an N number the AIF had an NX number. That was number one. The NX numbers could be sent anywhere in the world, the N numbers could not go further North than the equator, which was absolutely stupid but that was the way it was. There was a lot of, in the Labour department,

although Labour brought it in the unions didn’t like it, they said, “You shouldn’t have compulsory blah blah.” But they had to go into three months camp. And rather than go into any other unit that I didn’t know, I thought I would go in with the Sydney University, there were people there who were doctors, lawyers, whatever

university courses were going. And one of them was a lieutenant I won’t give you his name, he thought he was God on wheels. And I had a very good repertoire of dirty stories and he asked me to write them down on one occasion and I got berated for talking about them another time. Anyhow a long story about him because eventually he joined the army,

he put a bullet here, came out here and he lived, survived. He was a doctor.

Right three months training, because the university has vac at the end of December it was in December, December January. Also the teachers,

I don’t know whether the teachers joined the regiment or they just came in with us, they trained with us. Because that was their holiday period too. And that’s when I had the, I joined, because I knew a lot of the blokes that were there, in those days it was very basic, no equipment, because what equipment there was going to the AIF, who had gone overseas.

Ingleburn. Ingleburn had been built started late 39 maybe 40. I mean Ingleburn at that stage was past the end of the line, the end of the line did go there, but if you had leave and you got to Liverpool, you got off at Liverpool and from memory it was about five miles, about ten if you’re half drunk and at two o’clock in the morning,

and you walked the rest. There was no transport, no buses. And it was a very good camp, I don’t know whether the first camp, that was Scots I think, the first camp was at Liverpool, but I think the first camp with the SUR was at Ingleburn.

Yes just ordinary army uniforms.

We didn’t have Bren guns at that stage, what Bren guns there were they were kept for the AIF. We were still mucking around with Lewis guns which weren’t much, they weren’t very good even in the First World War. They got a lot of jams.

Just hut after hut after hut all numbered in rows.

And there would be, a section would be a guard house, probably sleeping accommodation for twenty or thirty and there would be a flag pole outside and every morning a flag went up and somebody blew the bugle and you got woken to the sound of a bugle. It was a proper army camp, typical army camp. Silly thing happened.

You know what Ingleburn the country around there is like, it is as flat as a tack and hot in summer. And one day we were, I don’t know why we didn’t have any equipment, just went out on some sort of route march without any equipment. And they stopped in the afternoon, and we were right next to the canal that brings water from Prospect, Sydney water from one place to another. And we didn’t have water bottles or anything like that,

and some bright bloke found a bucket and hopped into the canal which I think was about as wide as this room and water was flowing a fair amount and we were all sipping some water, and an officer came around and said, “Throw that water back!” We all said, “Why?” He said, “You’re federal troops that’s state water.” So we all went thirsty. I mean they saw the laws an ass, that’s true.

Oh we had a palliasse, do you know what a palliasse is? A piece of Hessian, and you get five pieces of straw and they all cross. No matter what you do with a palliasse it is never comfortable, you either over stuff it or under stuff it. No happy medium. You’re pillow was your main pack if you wanted it. and you slept on your floor and you had to fold your palliasse up in the morning, fold

your blankets, everything had to be spic and span and if it wasn’t you did it again and again. All got in trouble finished in the guard house. And when you did guard duty you all had the same equipment as the AIF, the two pouches, the small pack on the side and the big pack on the back and a kit bag, when you moved you wanted

three horses and a cart just to move. We had great coats in summer, that was great, there were very, very heavy woollen ones and the uniform was woollen. We had KDs Khaki Drill shirts and pants for every day. That’s what you wore, I think you had two pairs of pants and shirts. You were issued with what was called a hussoff, or a housewife. It was a little thing like that and it had needle and thread and all of that sort of thing.

It was spelt housewife but called hussoff. I don’t know how. And if you’re buttons fell of you sewed your buttons on, I refuse to do buttons these days I get someone to do them for me.

It was routine. You did the same thing day in day out which incidentally saved my life I would say. One of the things you first

land was to fall, to hit the ground so that you made a small target. Now today sixty years later when I got wounded I can’t tell whether I was there, there, there, there, or there, somewhere on that line, how long it took to fall would be half a second at most.

I can’t tell you if I got wounded before I fell as I fell or as I hit the bottom. I will never know, I don’t want to, I would like to know but I don’t want to. I don’t know whether I heard the gun fire, it was an LMG that’s a Light Machine Gun and there were eight of us in a row which we should have been I suppose. We had fought the Japs we had been on patrol since six in the morning, and all we had

on, we had no packs or anything, just our bandoliers I had an Owen gun so I had half a dozen or more Owen gun clips, and they had I think about thirty rounds. Another bloke, I forget who it was, we were into a creek up to about here a very low creek and the Japs were in front of us somewhere, and we had fired some shots and a grenade or two and we heard one bloke moaning

so we knew we had some sort of success. And, as the Japs normally did, we just laid there for about half an hour in the water, it was warm anyhow, our rear ends in the water. Eventually the moaning stopped and we just went so we all, the eight of us got back together, we were walking out of this creek to go back to where we had left all of our gear. Hadn’t had breakfast of course. We had left about six in the morning, and as we came

around a LMG, Japanese, from the left hand side, and it is called inflated fire comes in. I was on the left and I got hit in the leg. Jimmy next to me, got hit in the shoulder and we didn’t know at the time, but as we hit the ground I knew my leg was broken because I tried to turn over and I turned but the leg wouldn’t. So Jimmy

hit the ground and we knew that he was in trouble because he said, “I can’t feel my feet.” He had been hit in the shoulder and it had travelled along the shoulder blade and severed his spine. He laid there for, well we were there for about four hours and he was getting weaker and weaker. Later that night in the RAP [Regimental Aid Post] he died next to me. I had seen a lot of dead bodies but no mates.

Well that was brought on by the training, you were told. We were taken out one hot day in the middle of whatever it is out past Ingleburn, “Lay down and go to sleep.” And you had to learn to sleep in the middle of a hot day. You grabbed your sleep where you could, that’s part of the training. I got to the stage

where a Bren, I could pull a Bren apart with my eyes closed, put a bandage on, pull the firing mechanism, that’s about the only thing you pull apart. The firing mechanism was quite complicated, and somebody would pull it apart, put the pieces together, blindfold me and I could put it together.

And that’s the sort of training we did. You did the same thing day in day out, it drove you bloody mad, but you learnt to do it and it saved your life.

Well when we went to Adelaide,

Well with the junior leaders course,

I just got a letter, you are requested to go to Mona Vale to do a junior leaders course.

Yes, but that wasn’t only Sydney University that was all over the area people were picked out to be junior leaders, junior leaders were lance corporals, corporals,

whatever depending on your experience. And that was a wonderful experience because where we stayed was a place called La Cornish [?], incidentally Mona Vale in those days was the end of the world. There was no bus, there may have been a bus during the day. The bus finished at Dee Why and you had to walk from Dee Why to Mona Vale, and this old place was called La Cornish and apparently I found out later that it used to

be the haunt in the early twenties, young blades would take their ladies friends down there for a dirty weekend. And it was a beautiful old place, it was Spanish white and all of that, and we had rooms and palliasses again of course no beds or anything like that. And our instructors were all First World War men who had stayed on in the army. They were staff sergeants and sergeant majors. They were

very good, they were very stern, these same blokes had trained the AIF. They knew what they were talking about. There was one rule only, that there were no rules, you could go out at night any time you like. There was one rule I am sorry, one rule; you had to be fit for work the next day. That was the only proviso,

you could do anything you like. And I don’t know if you remember, we used to go to dances at Dee Why. Somehow get out there and one or two o’clock in the morning, half a dozen of us were walking back from Dee Why to Mona Vale, which is a fair step at two o’clock in the morning and we see lights coming. There were very few lights in those days, nobody lived out there. I mean Pittwater was the end of the world.

And there are lights and everybody is, “Oh beauty.” And he stopped and it was a night cart, do you know what a night cart is?

A night cart in the unsewered areas you had drums that you put into your toilet and once a week or whatever, usually done in the day, they were called night carets used to come around and pick up these tins and drums, big drums,

and put them on. And that was called a night cart, and they would take that away and I don’t know what they did with the sewerage, but they would replace the tank. So some of the blokes got on board, but I was prepared to walk. It wasn’t a very nice smelling organization. So that was that, that was about two weeks I think. We did all sorts of things. I think I explained

we did TEWTs and that sort of thing, tactical exercises without troops?

Well it was a lesson you do on paper and they say right you’re there and there is the enemy there and there is a hill and you worked out how you would take the enemy. Tactical exercise without troops.

Well that’s was the thing,

all tactical, not drill we didn’t do drilling. We had all done the drilling. Those sorts of things, tactical exercises. Navigation with prismatic compass, all of that sort of thing. I think I could still use a, can you use a prismatic compass? Do you know what it is? It is a little thing like that and it has got a prism and you can tell where you are and you say, “Well it is north east from here.”

Dee Why that was the closest, that was the only place that had the dances and the beer. See the hotels close at six o’clock so there was no chance of being there to get grog unless you went around the back and paid high prices for it.

That was the law, six to six and that wasn’t changed until the 50’s in New South Wales. The churches ran the place as far as alcohol and dancing. You know when Norm and I got married we went to Surfers Paradise and the Surfers Paradise hotel, which was the only one there at the time and it was owned by Cavill, that’s where

Cavill Road gets its name. It was owned by Mister Cavill and he gave more attention to the zoo that were around the back. Surfers Paradise in 1946 when we were there there was a hotel, across the road, single track road, there was a little bit of a sand hill, and a sho there that sold newspapers and bits of everything and that was it. Oh no there was a theatre, picture show

that had canvas seats and you could smoke in it. I think they had two shows a week or something like that. The beach was there and from Surfers to Southport was quite a big town. Surfers was nothing, all they had down there was holiday homes for people in Brisbane like, well I don’t know there is nowhere now in Sydney, but people had little huts, not huts but a small house, but they would go down there for their holidays. And between

Surfers and Southport, do you know the area at all? So you know where the Nerang River comes in? There was a one way wooden trestle over that.

Oh just normal dance halls, usually a few mothers there watching their little daughters if they went on their own. Usually you would pick up a girl and have a dance, they weren’t serious and you weren’t, you went there for fun.

Went straight back to Ingleburn because the three months course had started. And I don’t think I had a stripe but I was an unpaid acting lance corporal or whatever it was, and then on Boxing Day, I can’t remember up until then,

stinking hot out under a tree, I don’t know where we found it but there was a tree, and I had half a dozen blokes say I am telling them how to pull a Bren gun down and put it back together, these were raw recruits and I was an old hand by this time. Well I was because I had the camp before, in 1940 I had done a camp then and then the junior leaders course, we did weapons

training too down there. So as I say even at that stage I could pull a Bren gun apart in the middle of the night, because particularly the firing block was quite complicated see a Bren gun had two sperate barrels, and there was a little lever and you push the lever up and you could take the barrel off. And the barrel had a handle on it, you

used to carry it, carry the whole Bren gun, and the barrel if it got very hot, as long as you kept it away from yourself, and the steam, that’s why you had to keep it away, and the steam, you could put it right in if you had any water there. It wasn’t very easy apparently in the desert, but theoretically you could put it in water and it would cool that barrel and you had a second barrel that you could put on, one of

your second people, number twos; you had two people on a Bren gun normally, the bloke firing and the number two would be next to you and when your thing ran out he would unclip it and put a new one on and you would re-cock it and just start firing again. And you could also fire single shot, there was a little lever ,you could have off, safety, one shot, or automatic.

Boxing Day in the stinking heat, and an officer came around, I don’t know whether he was an officer or a sergeant or something. “They’re calling for volunteers to go to New Guinea.” And as it turned out I think there was six or seven of us from the Sydney Uni [university] who got our gear and taken straight into the Sydney Showground. The Sydney Showground was the centre of operation in Sydney.

If you went on leave you went through the Showground, if you joined up you went through the Showground. We were taken in there and given complete medicals, we hadn’t had a medical before I don’t think. They even vaccinated us in there, I don’t know. but we had the whole bit. And said, we were supposed to have gone on the, I forget the name of the ship it was in Sydney Harbour at the

time, old ship, the Aquitania. It was an old ship I think it had four funnels, big ship, not quite as big as the Queen Mary but the Aquitania was supposed to be going to Port Moresby that night. Anyhow we were given three or four days leave. We got back on New Years Day or the day after, and we were herded into, do you know the old Sydney Showground? Well we were herded

into the older well the newer huts that was full of men, five or six hundred. And I would say ninety-eight percent of them were drunk as lord’s absolutely hopeless. So they lined us up and a bloke starts calling the roll and one of our blokes, Andrews or whatever his name was, he was an A, and he got pushed over there and by

this time the bloke just gave it away he was going to call the roll and put some over there, anyhow he lined us up and in true army fashion, “I want six volunteers, you, you, you.” And he lined us up, he counted he wanted two hundred and pushed them over there, and this bloke Andrews or whatever his name was, he went over there. And they became the 55th 53rd battalion and they

were sent to New Guinea when they got there which was early in 1942, they had, well go back a bit. They had no training, all they used them for was loading and unloading trips and they were the first people that met the Japs in Kokoda, which was about thirty mile out of Port Moresby.

They had no training, their officers apparently, the CO [Commanding Officer] got killed a number of the officers got killed the first day, these poor bastards had no training what so ever. Anyway the rest of us, I might be wrong about the numbers I don’t know, but the rest of us sat around and I think a couple of hundred of us went to Adelaide, I think it was the middle of

January, about the 24th of January. We just sat around, I don’t know what we did. I think they might have sent us out to Ingleburn, but we were just lost. And they were going to send us to Darwin, thank God we didn’t. and somebody told me, “Oh we’re going to Darwin the shooting is good up there.” So I went and bought a twenty two to do some shooting. Never got used I had it at home at Dover Heights for some years, but I gave it away in the finish.

Well the medical they weighed you etcetera, and the eye test was “Yes, one two,” teeth they didn’t worry about teeth. Heart and lungs and that sort of thing, at that stage I didn’t tell them, I had forgotten that I had had the

kidney problem as a kid I didn’t mention that, I was passed. I was very fit. Going back, the three or four hundred, I don’t know how many people were there. That was an absolute disgrace, what had happened was on Boxing Day they were a number short, say five hundred, they were five hundred short of this battalion. And so they asked

the CO of every unit that was in, not only the Sydney area but Singleton, and there was half a dozen camps around New South Wales for volunteers to make up this draft. And the SUR did the right thing, we had seven volunteers we went. The other units did the absolute wrong thing,

and I would say nine out of ten of them did the same thing, they went through and they found twenty, thirty or forty who were no hopers, they were all conscripts remember, absolutely no hopers, they would never make soldiers didn’t want to be, and they were sent in. and that was the calibre of these poor bastards who were sent to New Guinea. And instead of trying to train them,

for nearly nine months all they did was load and unload ships and trucks, they never had a chance.

I don’t know, I think it had a name but I don’t know, I have got my papers here,

I could find out what it was called at that stage, do you want me to do that after? Now?

I have got my attestation papers, not attestation, the whole history. I could find out what it was called but it was a re-enforcement mob, whatever, they gave them names.

That was part of a draft to go to Darwin.

No I had quit the Sydney University Regiment, I was now part of this draft, call it ABC, number 2 draft for Darwin. Well when we got to Adelaide we were then split into two. I went with one part up to Woodside which was great in summer, awful and cold, do you know Adelaide?

Do you know the hills? Woodside? You know Hahndorf do you know Onkaparinga? Up in the hills? It is cold. And Woodside had next to it an abandoned mine, I presume it was a gold mine and it had a lot of water in it and that’s what the pumped up and we washed in it. you can imagine how hard it was, and cold, we didn’t have any showers, that was passé,

and we did training there for three months at Woodside. The other party half of us, or a number of us went to Woodside, the other number I forget the name of the place which was a railway terminus and New South Wales Railways used to come there and they would unload them and put them on a train to go to Alice Springs.

And Peterborough, Peterborough was the terminus and that’s all they did for probably six months, they just unloaded and loaded trains. We at least did some training. And I think I was the only NCO that they had, I became a corporal and then the sergeant, I don’t think I ever got paid. And then I became the sergeant major and I used to try and drill these poor blokes, none of them wanted to be drilled, none of them wanted to be in the

army anyhow, and that’s where I got my name the Black Bastard.

Well I was a bit officious, put it that way. I was very military at that stage and I thought, I was a bit imbued at having done the two camps at the school, and the couple of camps in the SUR and done the, I was a bit gung ho I think was the term,

and yes I can be very abrasive. Ask the people here, I am still abrasive at times I don’t suffer fools easily.

Training that I had learnt before. Hit the ground, lay down,

check your Bren gun that sort of thing. And there were drill sergeants there that were known as re-treads from the First World War. This is 1942, and so the World War II had finished in 17, so they’re

twenty-five twenty-six years past when they got out of the army. Say twenty-six years, so they’re in their forties and they were quite good. There was one bloke who was the bugler and his name was Bartholomew, I can remember that. And I used to go, although I wasn’t a sergeant I was welcomed, I was a part of the sergeants mess, I might have been a sergeant,

I went into the sergeants mess and I was the only NCO of my unit, had a coupe of officers. And anyhow we used to get pretty pie eyed most of the nights and Bartholomew used to go overboard, and he would come out in the morning, very bleary eyed, middle of winter, April May probably bitterly cold, and he would put the brass bugle to his mouth

and throw up into the bugle. And he was known as Bartholomew the Bugling Bastard. He was a great bloke but he over did it with the grog.

The Japanese had come in yes.

I don’t know when Darwin was first bombed, do you know?

February was it? Well we were safely ensconced in Adelaide at the time and I had my rifle that I was going to shoot in Darwin. I am glad I wasn’t in Darwin now because those poor sods they weren’t until recently they weren’t accepted as returned men because they hadn’t gone overseas.

Oh utter frustration. Going nowhere, lost, absolutely lost not doing anything. Routine, over and over again. I think once we got on a rifle range and actually gave everybody a shot I think some of them hit the target, that was about it. I was a reasonably good shot. And quite a good shot, if I might say so.

But that was it. and then after about three months they pulled us out of there and they sent us to Colonel Light Gardens, do you know Adelaide at all?

Well Colonel Light Gardens is at the end of the tram line, had trams in those days. Incidentally the trams used to all finish at the same time, twelve o’clock at night. If you went into town, you had to get on the last tram to go out to Colonel Light Gardens. It was the end of the line.

And right opposite there was a hospital, this was just a paddock, we were in tents. And we had a very nice captain there, a lieutenant, I forget his name, who got killed, not in action, I found out later, there was two or three officers and I was the acting sergeant, had other sergeants and used to go into the sergeants mess. I remember I came home in the middle of winter in Adelaide, it is freezing cold,

I had been into town to see a movie or something like that. And I went into the sergeants mess and they had one of these pot bellied stoves, and it is glowing red. And out of the cold into this hit atmosphere and they said, “Do you want a drink?” and I don’t normally drink rum, I said, “I think I will have a double OP [Over Proof] rum.” And I had two or three double OP rums and I went out and hit the cold air and I don’t remember anything until the next morning. We were sleeping in tents. Anyhow this other bloke,

this other second officer the captain was very nice, we used to have long talks and this other officer I forget his name Pie or Pim or something. And apparently he went to another unit and in the officer mess one evening they were talking about drawing side arms, his pistol and something happened and the other bloke drew the pistol and shot him and killed him.

Oh there would be a court marshal.

Not a court marshal a court of enquiry.

Discipline was not terribly stern., I mean you couldn’t have discipline. There was no fence, there was nobody to stop you getting on the tram to go to town. All that stopped you was whether you had money or not to pay the tuppence or the thruppence it cost to get to town.

And a shilling or whatever it was to go to the movies, picture show I am sorry, not the movies. There was nothing to stop you it was open slather. Incidentally that hospital is now Concord or Vet [Veteran] Affairs hospital in Adelaide, Colonel light.

Knowing the army no. it could happen to anybody., it was such a huge organization by that time. Three division in the Middle

East, one division is lost by that time in Malaysia, in Singapore. And you have got thousands, I don’t know how many division of chocos, lets call them that for lack of a better name. And the logistic work of keeping track of these people, it is immense.

The army has got chain of command, that’s the word, it’s a horrible word. But to give you an idea, the general would say, this is going back to the First World War, “We will attack point A at 0700 tomorrow morning.” So that would go down to the next in command, and he would say right, well we have got to be there by 0700, so he would tell the next in line, “They have got to be at that point at 0600.”

And the next bloke would go, well the way my men are going, they’re not going to be there so he would say, “0500.” And by the time it got down to the poor infantry, the lowest they had to get up at two o’clock in the morning. To be there at eight o’clock and that’s what happened. The chain of command. Look I don’t care what organization you have got, you’re always going to have, let me say

misfits, idiots if you like. People who are looking after their own interests, they want improvement, they want to be lifted up and it comes down to the ‘Peter principal’, I don’t know whether you know the ‘Peter principal’. The ‘Peter principal’ says that you promote people above their ability, and the normal one is, you have

got a bloke in your business and he is a very good truck driver and you say, “Look he is worth more” so you make him the dispatch manager. Truck driver he is, dispatch manager he never will be. That is the Peter principal, you promote people above their ability to do. I have got a joke about that, I don’t know if you want to hear it? A bloke used to go shooting,

bird shooting every year. He used to go down to the same place, and he used to hire a dog. And he goes down there and he says to the bloke, “ I want a dog.” And the bloke says, “Look I have got a new dog here, instead of the usual two hundred dollars a week you can have him for fifty, but he is only very raw.” And so he goes out and the bloke says, “What's his name?” “Salesman.” So he goes out and he comes back and says, ”Absolutely wonderful keep him for me for next year.” Next year, it is now a hundred and fifty, goes the next year two hundred and fifty,

next year five hundred dollars. Goes the next year and he says, “Right I will have Salesman.” And the bloke says, “I am sorry you can’t have him.” “Why? He is wonderful.” And he said, “That’s what we thought but we promoted him, we promoted him to Sales Manager and now all he does is sit on his arse and bark at the other dogs.” And that is the Peter Principal.

In the army? I don’t think I reported to anybody, just next in line.

I hadn’t heard of the ‘Peter principal’ then as such. But it is there in all companies, the army, anywhere the employs a lot of people. Telecom is no worse or no better.

Yes the 7th Division came back, they were the first to come back. And some of them landed in Adelaide.

Have you been to Adelaide? Well you know the parklands, very few people know this in fact Norm and I were on a tour and the tour guide didn’t know it, it was Kings Tour at that stage. And I explained to him that when Colonel Light laid out Adelaide, it has been dead for years that why it is laid out. When Colonel Light laid out Adelaide,

those parklands around were designed for agistment of troops. As necessary. And that’s exactly what happened to them in 1942, when the 2/7th came in they put tents up and that’s where they were camped, in those parklands. And that’s exactly what Colonel Light had envisaged.

It was just tents.

Lots of tents.

Well a division, I don’t know, probably a division would be seven or eight thousand. But the 7rth Division were the ones that were then shipped to New Guinea to fight at Kokoda, or the Kokoda Track. They all started off in Port Moresby. The arrived completely ill equipped, they were wearing shorts and short sleave shirts. They had

respirators, gas masks if you want them. they had tin hats. They had the same as we did, army leather boots, and I mean leather boots in mud, I don’t know if you have ever seen t, real mud. Leather boots in real mud, they would last a week or ten days. Quite often I was barefoot. And these poor sods had come back from the Middle East given virtually

no training and were sent straight up onto the Kokoda Track. And they were ill equipped, I have got this little five minute clip I will show you. That was ’42, September October. By the time we went to Wau, well I didn’t get there until March but my unit got there in January ’43

only four or five months later, number one if you didn’t have your sleaves rolled down, your trousers tucked in and shirt done up at night, long pants only, you went to gaol. Mosquitoes. And you had mosquito repellent you could use. We still got malaria, that didn’t stop it, but you got gaol, you got fined or whatever,

you were ‘crimed’ was the word, for not being covered at night. We threw our tin hats away, useless in the jungle. Tin hats will not stop a bullet, tin hats are only used for shrapnel that drops on your head, so in the jungle all they do is make noise.

Absolutely we were prepared for nothing.

We didn’t know we were just lost. Going forward, after six months which would be June or July the Peterborough people came down and joined us. They had stopped loading trains and what have you and we were all moved out as a group to a place called Sandy Creek,

which is near Gawler, if I remember correctly Gawler is in the wine country. I don’t know if it is in the Barossa Valley, it could be. There were a lit of German descendants, there were a lot of Germans descendants in the Adelaide Hills. And I mean there was, all of the towns up there had two names, Hahndorf was the German name, I forget what it was. They all had German names. in the First

World War a lot of Germans had been interned, Second World War I think they were still a bit Hitler’s way but we didn’t have much to do with them. But we went out to Gawler, not Gawler,

Sandy Creek near Gawler. About five miles out .and we did some intensive training as a group. Not so much weapons but getting fit. And I remember on one occasion, I don’t think we even had packs on,

we certainly didn’t have rifles, we did a twenty-five mile route march, twenty-five miles there and back. We got back about five o’clock in the evening, we might have had dinner I don’t remember. About half a dozen of us went and had a shower, put on our uniforms, in those days we didn’t have SDs [Service Dress] the heavy duty uniforms, just

had khaki pants and shirt. Walked into Gawler, another five miles. Danced all night mostly with German girls with the parents all around seeing nothing went on. Nothing to drink of course and then around about twelve o’clock walked back the other five miles and got up the next morning fresh. We were young.

No. They were mostly second generation Germans,

but they were very strict with their daughters obviously, and with good reason I would say. Right.

I don’t know I always seemed to miss out somehow. In Adelaide I had some, while I was in Adelaide my uncle that I mentioned before Cecil Lubar, he wrote me a letter and some friends of his

had an absolute mansion you have got no idea. He was a doctor, in his fifties, ENT, Ear Nose Throat man, who was the leading man in Adelaide at the time. I don’t know where he was born, European born. He had migrated to America in 1913 and got his medical degree there and then come to Australia, Eugene,

I will remember the name in a moment. He had this most magnificent home, you have got no idea. A lounge room you could hold a ball in, grand piano, loved music. Any people who came out to give concerts would practice, hang on. Anyhow would come out,

and they were Russian, that’s right, and everyone called her Manya which is Russian for mother. And her cooking was magnificent, her borscht was magnificent and in those days you couldn’t have cream, but they had cows so they had cream. And I just walked in, used to walk in of a night, I would say, “I am here for the weekend.” I had my own room. And they had a daughter who was married with a child to a

German refugee, German Jewish refugee who I dint like, his name was Hans and I just never took to him. he had a daughter Louise who was absolutely magnificent, about my age or a year or two older. But she had a boyfriend, had a son who was in the army, Louise’s boyfriend was in the air force and there was another

daughter who had died of polio at a very young age. And the sad part was many years after Louise married the air force bloke who wasn’t Jewish, that doesn’t matter, she had a child and a couple of years after the child was born she got child. She was wheel chair bound and had another child. I never saw Louise or the second child

again, Matison, M A T I S O N Eugene Matison. Everybody called her Manya which was Russian for mother.

I don’t remember, if I was a private I was being paid five bob a day, a sergeant, ten bob a day. But I don’t know I can’t remember., that’s one thing I do regret, I lost my pay book and my hat.

Right, we did three months at Sandy Creek and then we all went over to Watsonia. Watsonia was an absolute pig sty, it was built on a slight hill. We were in tents, we had no bed boards or things like that and when it rained as it does in Melbourne,

it used to just run through, the guy that was running it was a guy called Major Conkey. I think he was, came from the Bathurst area in Sydney. He was you know squatoscophy, a very wealthy family, and I think apart from anything else they had the big slaughter yards, but I am not sure. But he was Conkey and he

surrounded himself with about five or six sergeants. They had been in the Middle East, and one of the sergeants was reputed, he was English had an English accent and it was reputed that he had deserted the English army and Conkey had taken him on strength. This was the rumour, it was a furphy but that was the rumour. Anyhow we were there for about six weeks with no leave.

Anyway Snowy, I forget his name, and myself decided to go in one Sunday and go to a dance in Melbourne and we got sprung, but we both denied it and Conkey had us up in front of him and we both said, “No we weren’t there.” I had a particular cape that had been issued to me, it was army issue when it was issued to me but I have never seen one before or since. And I had warned this into

whatsiname and somebody warned me on the Sunday night when I came back that I had been sprung. And I gave them my cape and they got rid of it for me. And they searched my gear and they couldn’t find this cape, they were going to pin it on. Snowy was what I called a wood butcher, a carpenter. Snowy was a wood butcher and he got paid, we were both paid as acting sergeants.

With an acting sergeant you can be an acting sergeant today and be reverted. Anyway we both fronted up and both denied that we had been there and wanted proof. And Conkey couldn’t, one of the sergeants said, “Well they’re lying.” Anyway Conkey said, “Do you want to be reverted or do you revert to your substantive rank?” Anyway we both said, “We revert to our substantive rank at our own request.”

He would revert us, it was a no win situation. Anyway when I joined the unit in New Guinea he said, “What's this reverted at your own request? Why?” so I explained to him. now I think last year I had a look at this in my memoirs, and I thought I have got an idea that Conkey being in the

country being a squatoscophy, there was an organization then, I forget the name of it, they were the same people that the, when the bridge was opened they were a kind of an underground army, and they were violently anti-Semitic amongst other things. The New Guard, they were called the New Guard. And I have got a new idea being

Conkey and where he lived or came from Bathurst. I have got an idea he could have been one of the New Guard and the New Guard were anti-Semitic, and I have got an idea that poor Snowy was caught with me. He wanted me but he had to do poor Snowy too otherwise it could have been anti-Semitism. I don’t know, I have got no proof but that’s,

All I know is the sergeants that were trying to teach their people, when I got reverted, some of them were all right but a couple there they didn’t know anything. Now I had been teaching these things for months, so I was

just one of the troops and I got nasty, I admit. And these sergeants would say, “So and so and so and so.” And I would say, “Sorry sergeant you’re wrong. It is done this way.” In front of the troops. Okay nasty thing to do but at that stage instead go being an over keen soldier I had become a renegade, I didn’t give a damn. All I wanted to do was belittle these people who had belittled me. Probably natural, probably wrong.

But anyhow, I had joined the AIF somewhere in the middle of ’42 and this was part of the 18th battalion, of their training .and at the end of the day about eighty percent of the troops that had come over with us were sent off to New Guinea, they joined the 18th battalion. But there were about forty or fifty of us, and somehow

or other pour papers had got stuffed up. And we were lost again, forty or fifty of us. And the 18th battalion, I found out a lot of them got killed. They were in Buna, Gona, December ’42, and I know a lot of them, I knew a couple of names of blokes that I had been with and

one of them should never have been in the army, he was killed. I won’t say his name. Poor little, he was physically small he had feet that were as flat as two pieces of meat. He had been called up. He couldn’t read, he couldn’t write. He had worked on a dairy, got paid peanuts, and if he broke something they would

dock it out of his, well he never got paid, never got a penny. They fed him badly. And all of the boys looked after him, his mates looked after him and I looked after him as much as I could. And he got killed. He should never have been in the army. He was underweight. Mentally he was about twelve or thirteen, at the most.

Yes the little bugger tried his heart out. And everybody helped him. they would write letters for him, read letters for him. everybody tried to help him. look he was a trier. He tried his heart out. He wanted to be one of the boys, wanted to be accepted and he was accepted.

But it was a travesty, he should never ever, even have got past the first examination, physical. I am not joking, plates of meat. Anyhow, getting away from that, so the fifty of us got left there had been a muck up with my NX number. I found out that it was issued sometime in the middle of ’42.

When I joined the unit in New Guinea I was down as NXM, NX being AIF, M being militia. NXM, and my old militia number 42468 which was an M number, so in the book, the battalion book called the Fiery Phoenix, in the Fiery Phoenix

my number is NXM42468 where I got wounded I am NX142729 which was my correct number. That’s something you never forget. No he, that was Conkey. Anyway then we wandered around .we got sent from there to Brisbane. We got parked on the middle of the golf course with tents.

No NCOs. At this stage I would not take charge I just sat back and relaxed. They had mucked me up, they had kicked me in the guts and I just was not interested in taking charge or doing anything to help. Anyhow we were there for, that was on New Years Eve, Christmas Eve rather. They said, “Right we want you guys.” They put us on trucks, we went into the wharves.

And they had forty-four gallon drums, you know what a forty-four gallon drum is? And they had them on the end and they were full of petrol or gasoline, might have been petrol or gas, I don’t know which. It wasn’t avgas in those days it was high octane, different octane. And we were rolling full drums, hob nail boots across these drums and standing them up on the end. Down on the wharf,

twenty or thirty metres away the wharfies, Christmas Eve, we’re paid five bob a day or six bob, they’re getting, it is Christmas Eve, they are getting overtime, double time because it’s a holiday and they are unloading empty forty-four gallon drums and they had got a bloke with a two-wheeled trolley. He pushes it along,

one bloke pulls the empty drum back, he puts his trolley underneath, the other bloke picks it up, walks fifteen or twenty metres puts it down. He is getting time and a half, double time, penalty rates the lot. Forget, as far as I am concerned you can forget the unions.

Just wharfies., wharfie were, there is an old story, one of my favourite stories.

The wharfies formed a choir and they were looking for a name and somebody came up with a name The Lootin’ Boys Choir. If you ever had anything to do, there is another lovely story about the wharfies. A wharfie walks off a wharf one night and he is pushing a wheelbarrow and the bloke on the gate says, “What have you got in that?” And the wharfie said, “Oh nothing.” Next night the same thing. And a week later the bloke on the gate says, “Look I know you’re stealing something,

what are you stealing?” and the wharfie says, “Wheelbarrows.”

That’s another story, there was major, I don’t know where he came from I think he was from the First World War and he came down and said, “Right tomorrow morning nine o’clock you’ll be put on a truck and taken away we’re going to Toowoomba.”

Nine o’clock the truck came and no one was ready, there was no one to organise them and the major was furious. This was Christmas time in Brisbane, it was hot. And he was fuming because it reflected on him, he hadn’t done anything, he had just told us to get ready and we hadn’t, there was no NCOs, I wasn’t going to take charge, and he was fuming. So he then ordered us to put our respirators, that’s our gas masks on and marched us up and down the bloody street for an hour and a half in the middle of summer in Brisbane

with a gas mask on. That made us very happy. The next day somebody organised I don’t know who organised, we got on a train to Toowoomba, lovely camp about five mile out of Toowoomba, up in the hills. Toowoomba was a great city in those days. The Yanks hadn’t found it and there was plenty of beer in the pubs. There was hardly any other troops there. And they used to pick us up of a morning on trucks and take us into Toowoomba, as I say about five miles down the hill,

park us in a paddock and I forget what we were doing. Anyhow I think I was the only one with a drivers licence but I had only driven a car with what they called synchronised gears. But in those days what was called synchro mesh that was fairly new, and most of the old truck had what they called gate gears, and I had never driven one. I had theoretically I knew. Anyhow I was the one they put

onto a more or less, a sort of a crane sort of a thing, and I was driving that so. They would pick us up and feed us, I don’t know what we had as lunch, feed us and take us back into camp. And then we would have to walk into town at night, walk five mile. One night I was walking along and a bloke came along on a motorbike. He said, “Do you want a lift?” and I said, “Yes” so I hopped on. Only trouble was he had a luggage carrier with no seat, no padding on it. And no

where to put your feet, have you ever sat pillion on a motorbike? Well I am sitting there on this bloody piece of wire racking, it was very uncomfortable but it was better than walking, I forget how I got home.

We didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t read a paper, there were no radios, I don’t know what was happening. There were lots of Yanks around sure.

Didn’t know what was happening, and I don’t know if the Battle of Brisbane was then or later. There was a big battle in Brisbane between the Yanks and Australians. Very seldom mentioned, but there was, there was a big fist fight, not only fist fight but knives and the whole bit. It was a riot.

No not really. We knew, all we knew was that they had taken Singapore.

I knew that General Bennett was made an absolute scapegoat. As a general his duty was to come home. Right? Not to be captured. And Blamey demoted him, did everything to him because he got out with his life and brought news on how to fight the bloody Japs back. And Blamey just ignored him.

I don’t know I wouldn’t think so. None of us read newspapers in those days and there was no such thing as portable radios. None of us had a radio to listen to.

Didn’t know a thing. Hadn’t even heard of Kokoda.

It was going to be hot.

I didn’t know much about New Guinea until we got there. Then we came back from Toowoomba, I think we were there for about two weeks. We went back to Brisbane. Got on a train, I don’t know where we got on a train, but that took us four or five days. And we were in a compartment, that’s what it was it was sort of horse shoe shaped. The door was on that side, there was a toilet we were lucky. And I don’t know

there was eight or ten of us. And we all put, at that stage we all had our kit bag which was about that big, we had a heavy overcoat, really heavy overcoat. We had our service dress the heavy service dress. We had a pack, side pack, respirator, tin hat a rifle and a bit of personal gear. Anyhow I think it was about four or five days

in the train. Very slow process. Every morning you stopped the train, got off had some breakfast and washed. And then you got back on the train and you would lumber along until lunch time and you got off, the trains were going along all of the time. See most of the trains going up that way were taking supplies for the troops. Ammunition and that sort of thing. Hardly any of it was going up by

sea because, the Centaur hadn’t been sunk by that stage but the sea was a bit dicey because the Japs had been there. And the Battle of the Coral Sea had been over by then. That was the turning point. If the Allies hadn’t won Coral Sea we would all be speaking Japanese. Anyway we finally got to Townsville

and we were parked four or five miles out of Townsville. It wasn’t even a camp, well there were a few tents, and a big pond, I think ti was rain water. and a corner shop that sold everything but cigarettes I wasn’t a smoker. And we were there for a few days and that’s where two of my mates, somebody started a two up game and two of my mates scored big. When I say scored big, thirty pounds each which

was a lot of money. And I wore a money belt. So each one said, “Right there is thirty pound. Don’t ever give that back to me no matter what I say or do.” Both said the same thing. They knew they could trust me because I didn’t gamble. Anyway a couple of days later, “Oh give us ten.” “What do you want ten for?” “Give us ten out of my money.” “You can’t have it.” “Give me ten out of my money or I will bloody well flatten you.”

So, within days I didn’t have sixty pound and I didn’t have two mates either. And then for some unknown reason we got on a train and we went up to a gold mining town. I will think of it in a minute. I don’t know what we went up there for. Stayed there a day or two, back on a train and went back to where we were.

The only thing I had, I had a diary, the only thing I didn’t keep was my diary. I had a fountain pen, a watch, that was about the only items of value I had. And a pay book of course that was most essential.

Pay book acted like a bank book. Theoretically, I never saw this done, with their pay they could have went to a paymaster and said, “Put this in my pay book.”

When?

I used to put it in the, they used to pay you every two weeks. Every fortnight you would line up and get paid and you would sign for it. and I would get the cash and put

it in my money belt.

Toowoomba was overcrowded place, I only went into the town once to get a beer. It was full of Americans, a lot of black Americans, a lot of American Americans, a lot of Australians. And some pubs.

Now if you went into a pub and they had beer, which was unusual, then you fight your way to the counter to get a beer, you had to have your own glass. Because a lot of, only essential material was being made in Australia and drinking glasses weren’t essential. So you made your own glass. Now all Australians beer all came in the same size bottle whether it was Tooheys

Resches or what have you. All the same, actually the same bottle. So you would get a bottle get a piece of string, put it in metho [methylated spirits], I never did it. put it in metho and put it around just where the bottle started to go around the top, and light it and is it burnt out you would put it into cold water and the top fell off and you had a glass. And do you know what it was called? A Lady Blamey. So to get a beer you had to have a Lady Blamey.

I don’t know that there was any general opinion, but I know my opinion now. Whatever the other is it is wiped out. I didn’t even think of him at that stage. But in hindsight he was hopeless. I think he was a good tactician but all he wanted to do was feather his own nest. He organised an phantom army, there was one army

he made a second army, one army he could only be a general, two armies he could be a field marshal. And he organised a phantom army, a lot of officers I don’t think there were any men, but there was a nucleus of a whole army, and got his baton, field marshal.

I think one day they said, “Right oh pack up get on the train.” We had come up on a rough sort of train, this is about five miles out of Townsville, and we get on a train, what are we in? Sleepers. Sleeper carriage. So we went the five mile into the docks and got onto the

SS Katoomba, Katoomba had been one of the ships that went oh say from Brisbane around to Perth and back again. Coastal, they were quite big ships. When I say quite big probably twelve thirteen thousand tonne I could find out. The Katoomba. The Manunda was another one. The Manunda was made over into a hospital ship. But there was Katoomba I forget the name of them, I could find out if you wanted me to, but the Katoomba was the one I went up on.

And being just an ordinary foot soldier where did we sleep? In the hold. Climb down ladders and God knows what, very comfortable, no palliasse no nothing. Just laid on whatever it was, it wasn’t steel I think it was just wooden pallet, whatever it was laid on that. And the next morning I wasn’t feeling well and I got taken to the sickbay and that’s where I spent the rest of the voyage on the ship. Somehow or other I had got a dose of dengue.

At Townsville.

Toowoomba was virtually free of nay services. I think we were roughly only the service people there and there was only fifty of us. There was a camp, certainly Toowoomba was very free. Townsville was, see that was the setting off point to go to New Guinea. And virtually all of the goods and what have you went from Townsville, they didn’t want to use the water ways that much

because there had been Jap subs and that sort of thing off the coast.

Didn’t see it really. I went into town, I wouldn’t even know, I wouldn’t know anything, all I know is there is a big hill. That’s about all I would know about Townsville. No the only thing I saw of Townsville was when I went through Ion the sleeper train to go to the wharf wouldn’t have a clue, never been there since.

I spent the, I don’t even remember spending a whole night in the hold and then they took me into the sick bay and I had a lovely trip nurses looking after me, and I had dengue. I think I got that in Toowoomba, or it might have been I still can’t remember the other place I am trying to think of.

Charters Towers, yes thankyou. You read the story. Why we went to Charters Towers I don’t know .

Charters Towers also came back into my memory because my father-in-law I think he was born in Charters Towers, I know he came from Queensland. He had three sisters, one married and two were maiden ladies. And his father died, Henry

was the oldest and I think he was only about ten or something like that. And his father was killed in a buggy accident. Road rage in those days. And he was a miner, not a miner so much but a mining engineer. And Henry put himself through university and became a pharmacist.

Yes, I had never seen so many Negroes. All of the trucks were, Moresby when I got there had virtually not been bypassed, but it was only a landing place. The war had moved away. This was February / March ’43. Kokoda had been over

well before then. Buna and Gona had finished around about Christmas time, Milne Bay much earlier than that. And in January my unit was flown into Wau, the 7th. The 5th, 6th and 7th were the 17th brigade. I don’t know where the 5th and 6th were but the 7th were flown into Wau and they got off the plane

and started firing. And it was the first time they knocked down, twenty-five pounder, what do you call them? artillery. They got them off the plane, assembled them probably a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes and they fired from the drome. And one bloke I met in hospital when I came back to Baulkham Hills, he had lost his leg below the knee

and he had been, got off on the plane in Wau, got wounded and went back on the same plane. And everybody thought that that was me, that was Harold Lambert got off the plane, got wounded and got back on the same plane. And as I think as Jack said, “My fathers story is a little bit different than that.”

I don’t remember. I know that we were transported.

There were no women in Port Moresby at that time and there was a swimming, tidal pool right in the centre of Port Moresby and all I remember seeing was many Negroes swimming there in the nude. And Americans and Australians and everybody, all swimming there in the nude. And somebody said, “The nurses are coming next week.” “Oh God now we’ll have to get dressed.” We

were taken, I remember vaguely remember landing there. As I say getting onto the boat, being in the hold and getting to the sick bay that’s all I remember. And the next thing we were in Murray Barracks, have you been to Port Moresby? Well Murray barracks, see everything was measured in miles in those days in Port Moresby, and I think Murray Barracks was about three miles out of the town, it wasn’t much of a town then. It was on

a kind of a hill with a concrete floor. We had a hut over it. and that’s all we were given a blanket, and that’s where we slept, on the concrete floor with one blanket. And we were used as a work party. Odd bods, we had obviously been slated as a re-enforcement to the 17th brigade who had a lot of casualties at this time,

landing at Wau there was a lot of casualties there. Also, you might remember we were supposed to go to Wau and of course they dropped us at Bulolo which is of course, twenty, thirty miles away. Down the Bulolo River, the Bulolo River starts in Wau and runs down to Bulolo, Bulolo is also a gold mining town. And when the,

very fascinating story Wau, the whole area was, there was a commando unit or a couple of commando units and when the Japs came, the Japs landed at Lae and Salamaua and didn’t move for months. And then all of a sudden they started to move and they came over the country, over the hills, and Colonel Flay I think was the man who was the colonel of, there was more than one company of commandoes.

They weren’t called commandoes. Independent companies were there official name in the Australian army. And he didn’t want them to have nay infrastructure and he blew everything up, including the trucks. And of course when the 17th Brigade arrived there was no trucks or transport but there was lots of bits and pieces and they put trucks together. So the plane we were on was supposed to land at Wau, we landed at Bulolo, one of the planes that was

supposed to land at Bulolo landed at Wau. So that night we came up on one of these reconstructed trucks with a flat top and all of the rest. And this tracks, and that’s about all you can call it, followed the river, and one side went straight up and the other side went straight down. So Harold was very wise, I sat on the back. With my legs over the back, because it wasn’t a case of if it went over,

when it went over I was going to get off, very quickly. And if you were on one side your legs could have gotten squashed and the other side you could have gone off and landed in this bloody great ravine. We mad it up to Wau.

Where? All along? Oh I didn’t see much vegetation in that trip because most of it was at night. I think the truck had lights but that was about it. But the vegetation

in Wau, Wau was quite settled for many years. I think it was 1928 or something, Wau was started with gold. Have you ever read a book called Gold Dust and Ashes?

Gold Dust and Ashes by Ion Idriess. In fact I cheated the censors which was always a game I cheated the censors when I got to

Wau I sent a letter home and said, “I have just read a very good book by Ion Idriess Gold Dust and Ashes, you should read it.” It is all about Wau. Anyhow they started, they found gold there and it was quite good gold, not very high quality but there was a lot of it. And before the war they had what they called Fockers, triple, three engine, much the same

plane as Smithy went in. and what they did they were corrugated aluminium sides. Metal frames, and they took the top off, and they could lift the top off and put in large pieces of machinery. And they brought in Wau I think

it’s two maybe even three dredges. Each dredge weighs over a thousand tonne. And each piece of that dredge was brought in piece by piece from Lae to Wau. Now from Lae to Wau if the crow could fly that way it is about sixty miles. But to get there, Lae is at about sea level, and between them there is a mountain

a couple of mountains about eight thousand feet. So the plane had to go up, go around and around to get up to eight thousand feet. Drop down the other side, to where the bottom of the Wau Valley was which was four thousand feet above sea level. And then of course Wau aerodrome is world famous, I think it is the only aerodrome in the world that runs up hill. It is a thousand feet long,

and the bottom is a hundred feet lower than the top, which is a grade of one in ten which is a steep grade, even for a car. And the planes land, in those days and also the DC3, the Douglas the Gooney Bird, DC3, Doug, Gooney Bird, Biscuit Bomber, whatever you want to call them they were all of the same. The Gooney Birds came, the Americans call them Gooney Birds when they landed on one of the Pacific Islands.

They had Gooney Birds then, they were called Gooney Birds then. DC3’s Doug’s, whatever you like, The Bombers, Biscuit Bombers, they are all the same plane. And they were the workhorse if you read this article, they were the start of transportation of troops and feeding troops and started in, I think I don’t know whether it was the Americans or the Australians. I think it was a bit of a combined operation.

I mean Kokoda could never have been won without those biscuit bombers. There was no way they could get up hill and down dale for dozens of miles and thousands of feet up and down. But of course nobody had through of parachutes. And what they would do, they would get a case of bully for instance and put a Hessian bag on and sew it up, turn in around and put another Hessian bag on and sew it up the other way.

And then at around about two hundred feet which was very low, they would put the flaps down and the wheels down and they would just have flying speed and they would go nearly all on top of hills, climb up the hill to lose speed and when it got to the top, the door was open, the door was about six foot wide, more you could get a truck in, the two doors came off. As you know I did one drop.

Apart from the pilot there was two Americans, and all of the stuff was up the front of the plane and they would push it down towards another Australian and myself. Now they had a bit of cord about them, I don’t know what that would have done. But the ASC Australian Service Corps that did everything from toothpaste to guns and food in the middle and there was a little

buzzer and two lights above the door and we had this open door, an the buzzer would go and then the light would change from red to green and then you pushed. There were a few casualties, got their feet caught out and went out with the parcel. They didn’t survive. And the collection rate was roughly fifty percent. But we got food we got ammunition, the grenades

were thrown out but not with the detonators. They were landed at Wau and the natives carried them up and all of that sort of thing. Rifle ammunition that was thrown out and half of it got wasted. But money meant nothing. Then there was ,the terrible stuff was known as dehydrated dog, that was minced mutton,

dehydrated mutton. Ti was the most dreadful product. I don’t know anybody that ever reconstituted it and it tasted edible. And of course a lot of that, fifty percent was thrown out, finished up in the valley and of course you can imagine the smell with this rain on it, this dehydrated dog. Look we I scored a nice American jacket out of it one day,

and nearly got killed in the bargain but it hit the tree above where we were standing . There were some casualties on the ground. People being hit by parcels. That was the start.

Not enough. Not nearly enough, when you needed it something turned up. I remember one day we really had a ball, somebody decided to throw out, well packed up loaves

of bread. And we all stood in line, we had our little dixies, there is your bread, there is your butter, there is your jam, and ate it with a spoon and it was beautiful.

I don’t know, read Gold Dust and Ashes, whether it is still in print I don’t know. It is Ion Idriess,

you will find it in the library. I forget who discovered Wau was there, not only Wau but all around. Anyway they had the two big dredges and they were on the river, that was the Bulolo River, which was on the northern side of Wau. Wau ran roughly east west, parallel to the coast. Now the northern side was where the Bulolo River was and that mountain went straight up about another three and a half thousand feet

and that took it up to about seven. And that’s where the Black Cat mine was. Now we went up there and did a patrol up there for about two weeks. There were three sections in a company, in a platoon, two sections stayed more or less on the top of the mountain, I was one of those, and the third section went down more or less into the mine, well into the mine area.

Well the Chinese bloke that became our cook who we wouldn’t loose near the fighting because he would have been knocked off, I mean slant eyes, anything with slant eyes, he was born in Australia but of Chinese extraction. He was furious, marvellous cook. The army wanted him to be a cook but he wouldn’t be in it he wanted to fight. We wouldn’t let him, we just about tied him up behind the line, well the poor so and so would have been killed.

But when they had us cutting trees, making telephone lines, Johnny, don’t ask me his surname, Johnny set up a cookhouse, he didn’t go out with us. And he had a drum about that big, that was what the dead dog came in, about a four or five gallon drum round. And it had a lid on it with kind of clips.

And he put that in and he built around it, mud, and whatsiname and put a fire underneath, we had an oven. And we put shelves in it. And we used to come back and he would have scones, we lived like kings when Johnny was making, he was the only cook in the army who could make powdered egg into tasty scrambled egg. The only one I ever met. Wouldn’t go to cooking school. he cooked in

the cane fields, came from Queensland. He was terrific. We would come home and he would have a proper dinner for us. When we were on this telephone business we would take a couple of tins of bully [beef] and a few biscuits for lunch and when we came home it was like coming home to your wife to have a beautiful and it was, he did marvellous things. He made the dehydrated dog taste like food.

And he would make a pie you know and put dehydrated potato over the top, and make a proper pie. And all in this makeshift oven. And I think it was one platoon, thirty men.

Right well the telephone was, in those days, I mean I am still talking the old days. In those days the primary telephone

was a covered cable which was laid on the ground. Now every, I don’t know say three miles you had to have a repeater station. Right? Because, and it was a hand operated telephone and the LC, Line of Communication from Wau to where the fighting was was so long that there were probably half a dozen men there just sitting on their bottoms getting the information and passing it on. So some bright so and so decided to put copper wire,

so guess who got the job? The carrier platoon, we weren’t carriers, we never saw a carrier, the carrier platoon got the job and this jungle you have got no idea how thick it was. And where we went, we went down like this but only about a hundred feet and then straight up another hundred feet. Because we were going in a straight line

and the track was doing this, because it was on the contour. We didn’t worry about contours. So they gave me an axe first, because I was solid. Bt that was no good, they called me Lightening because Lightening never strikes twice in the same place. That was me with the axe. So they took the axe off me but because I was well built and strong they gave me a machete. So I was one of the ones out in front to cut the light stuff. Blaze the

trail if you were, and we would go up the hill and then down again. And then the axemen would come along and chop every tree down but one about every sixty feet or whatever it was. They had some sort of a mark. One could be here and the next one half way up the next hill. The growth was so terrific, that one I remember, they cut

the tree down and it just fell off the stump and stood straight up. Over cover was holding it up. So they cut another piece off it which they called sleeper cutting, they were cutting a sleeper of it, bingo, down it came a bit further. So they said, “Forget that tree, we will cut another one a whole one.” But that’s how thick, you have got no idea, you cannot see the sky it is as thick as up here, completely light free.

We didn’t lay the copper. All we did was leave the trees and somebody came along later and actually put insulators on the trees that we left, and they were the telegraph poles. What we were making was telegraph poles. We never took the top off, the copper cable probably wouldn’t have been, I never saw it, but it probably wouldn’t have been more than

two hundred and fifteen or twenty feet off the ground. The overgrowth, we couldn’t scale up and take that off. All we did was make telegraph poles by chopping jungle. That lasted a few weeks and was very pleasant.

We came in by truck at night and didn’t see anything, and the next

day I was amazed. Absolute, ever see a picture called Shangri La? Goes back, Ronald Coleman, goes way back. Shangri La, you have heard the term Shangri La? It is supposed to be the heaven, and this Shangri La was umpteen thousand feet up in Tibet, green valley, mountain surrounded,

snow and ice and this beautiful valley and that’s what Wau looked like. Beautiful valley, I will say about five miles wide and fifteen or twenty miles long. Fairly flat, river on one side, Black Cat mine that side, mountain that side, that was called Mount Kaindi.

And Mount Kaindi up on top seven thousand feet up had a hotel which they hadn’t blown up thankfully and that hotel had a magnificent library, and that was the convalescent depot. Unfortunately I got malaria and fortunately they sent me up to the con depot [Convalescent depot]. And there were books and I love books and I was reading away, and a friend of mine said, “What are you doing?” and I said, “Reading a book.” And he said, “Oh come out with me.” I said, “What are you doing?” and he said, “I am going gold panning.” And I said, “Don’t be silly.” But he said, “Come out with me.”

So we, the only compulsory was a roll call at eight o’clock in the morning, the rest of the day was your own, you could go to the kitchen and grab a couple of tins of bully and some biscuits and you could go anywhere you like. So I went out with those bloke and we got to a little creek and there was pans there and picks and shovels. And there was a little hut and that was the assay hut.

So we went and had a look and there is paper all over the place. I didn’t know much but I knew by the assays that it was very rich gold, it was gold but of lower quality. And that was called Eadie Creek and that was worked as a gold mine. I don’t think they went much past the panning. So he said, “Here we go.” So we squatted down beside the river and I was hooked, absolutely hooked. The first time you get a colour and a piece of gold

in your hand. Anyway I lost that of course. They had what they called water de-tasting tablets. We never used them. They were little round glass vials about that, with a cork in them. they were very useful, petrol was very hard to get for cigarette lighters so I carried about six of these full of petrol. And the other one had, we took the tablets out, no one ever used them,

and the other one had bits of gold. I never got that back, I never got anything of mine back. When I arrived back in Australia, apart from cigarettes I had bought in hospital, five thousand of them, I had a fountain pen, a watch that still worked, marvellous, my pay book, dog tags, pair of shortie pyjama pants only that the Red Cross had given me.

Cigarette lighter? Did I mention that? Cigarette lighter. That was it that’s all I owned in the world. Everything I had, my beautiful zipper jacket, my sleeping bag all gone. I don’t know who got them but I didn’t, not a thing.

Right. I don’t know who did them, but they were little dugouts

little four bed, four slab on each side with a little walk in underground, when I say underground maybe five or six feet underground. And there were two bunks, just wooden on both sides and four of us slept there. I don’t know how built them, they were covered on top, you couldn’t see them from the top. We were lucky, in one of them we had a

Queenslander who worked on a paw paw farm, and there were paw paws everywhere. There were tomatoes, peas, potatoes, the civvies had lived like kings. Of course I was in headquarters company, where there was carriers, quartermasters, doctors, anything that doesn’t fight normally, the carriers do, but all of the others, transport and all of those

things are in headquarters company. And we were parked very close by and the headquarter company cooks, we used the term ‘liberated’ a fuel stove. It was about I suppose eight foot wide, came from the hotel. And they built it right on a little river, and above the river was a fifty metre, might have been fifty yards in those days,

swimming pool. And this little river, cold as ice, we were four thousand feet up, and the river was coming from seven thousand feet. And the water flowed into the swimming pool, out of the swimming pool so that it was always fresh, back into the little creek, and the cookhouse was on the other side of this little creek, and that was their refrigerator. They put the bully beef in there in the tin, case and all, and that was their refrigerator. And there was a glass,

I don’t know how they had glass windows there. They had something like seven or eight cooks there. Anyway one Sunday the big deal was fruit cake that came in rounds and also in a five six gallon can whatever. And they had this all beautifully cut up ready to eat and bingo, air raid. So the bombs dropped and the cooks, I think they had five slitties [slit trenches]

and they all dropped into four of the slitties and a bomb dropped in the fifth slitty, empty. But the glass finished on top of the fruit cake. That was our Sunday lunch. And the Bofors were going bomp bomp, the only thing I ever saw a Bofor hit was one of ours. But they did keep them high.

Nothing. They had blown it up, these people had blown all of the houses there and the hotel, there was nothing left, except the vegetables. And we lived like kings as far as the army was concerned. The cooks, I don’t know how they, it is apparently well known, I didn’t know it at the time but I have spoken to somebody who has been in

the tropics, do you like squash or that sort of vegetable? Do you know the best of the lot? Green paw paw. Get a green paw paw and cook it like a squash. But you can get green paw paw here, not papaya, I think it was paw paw.

No I didn’t get there until March, they had attacked in January. I don’t know whether it is true or not, there is a thing called a three inch mortar, you have seen a mortar? Well normally they would shoot about five mortar bombs and let it go. There was a mortar platoon, that’s also headquarter company the mortar platoon, I don’t know how many of them, might have had three four, five mortars. And somebody sighted from

there, you could see it from the airstrip, a piece of wooded scrubland and somebody said there was something like three or four hundred Japs there. And mortars as I say are normally three or four at a time. Somebody gave the order rapid fire and they rained hundreds of mortars on this area. No one ever went into it, there was a big sign outside ‘slaughter yard’.

Not one Jap survived. There were something two or three hundred. And as you went past you held your nose. No one ever went in to bury them or anything like that. They just stayed there, what happened after the war I don’t know.

About half to three quarters of a mile away down the end of a road. The first day we were there the captain of headquarter company a very wise man, he had us

there with his rifles and marched us up and down in threes, up and down this bloody road, straight road. Aircraft could have come over any time. That was my introduction to our captain. Then there was a thing called the swing bridge, somebody had put up a wire bridge, that was near the slaughter house.

No one, I don’t know anybody who ever went in there, that was the story. Another story with the kunai grass, do you know what kunai grass is? Well kunai grass is about six foot tall and it cuts you like ribbons, miles and miles of it, I had got photographs, I can’t get up at the moment, I have got a book I think over there, I will find it in a minute

and show you what kunai grass looks like, the most innocuous looking, lovely looking hill side. And this kunai grass will kill you.

It cuts you, it was dangerous, but there is nothing you can do about it.

We saw quite a few enemy planes they would come in and drop a few bombs and disappear, they were pretty

weak at that time. No the planes we looked for were the DC3’s bringing our food in. Well before we went up to the front we were working parties and a team of us would go up to the strip which was about a mile away, I am not sure if we took lunch with us, but we certainly took a pack of cards, have you played cribbage?

Well we took our bar of soap over and played crib,

and we played crib, euchre, five hundred, bridge, every game you can think of. We just sat there and if a plane didn’t come in we just turned around and came home, if a plane came in we unloaded them. but the planes landed uphill, and by that time they knew what to do. One bloke didn’t. by the time, instead of gunning his engine he didn’t and in the DC3 the brakes do not work

going backwards, and he finished up off the back end of the strip. He is still there, well he still was when I left. Nobody ever worried about him. Another day a little Australian fighter, I don’t know if they were any good or not, called a Boomerang came in, he had engine trouble I think. And he ran out of aerodrome. He didn’t stop and fortunately at the end there was half a dozen electric motors about that round,

it was a very good break. Anyway the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] sergeant he knew what was what and within ten seconds of him landing and getting out of the plane that plane was surrounded by RAAF blokes armed. And he got into the cockpit, and he took the altimeter and the clock and a few other things off and he said, “Right oh blokes now have a go.” All the blokes wanted was the perspex, to make rings.

And other items of jewellery.

Well the Black Cat mine was for two weeks. That was the only patrol we did around Wau.

Well we climbed up this hill, mountain whatever you call it. And we had, by that time, when we landed there, we had great coasts and god knows what.

So they first thing we did was get rid of the great coats, the tin hats, the gaspirators, better know as respirators or gas masks, we call the gaspirators, SDs [Service Dress] our heavy uniform. The only thing we kept was one pair of pants, one shirt. I was wearing jockey underpants and I kept about three or four pairs of those. As many pairs of socks as you could find. Singlets, no. what else? That was it, that was your clothing. You’re lucky if you had a pair of boots,

socks as I said. That was your clothing. Now with your gear normally, you had a big pack on your back, that got stowed, whatever you didn’t want was in that or your kit bag. Did I mention great coat? Fine in the Antarctic, not in New Guinea. And everything was left there. Never saw a thing. And up until that stage I had a diary and they said, “You’re not allowed a

diary.” I never saw it again. Otherwise I would have known what happened from December 41 to you know 43. some people did keep diaries apparently. Then with your pack you threw the big pack away and kept the small pack. And you also kept

two maybe three blankets whatever you could carry, because at seven thousand feet at night it is cold at night. And I mean cold. And where we slept if you’re lucky had a roof over it. But there were native huts, built like a native hut, built by the army, all open four corners, and the top would be twenty-five feet above the ground, plenty of fresh air,

and I think they had bunks but you’re not sure, and you slept there. And I woke up one morning and the whole God damned thing was shaking, it was an earthquake. And the two sections were in that one, and the Black Cat mine where the cook went, where Johnny went, I don’t know what that was but he got a lot of gold over there while they were patrolling, they wouldn’t let him go one the patrol. And we used to do a patrol

every second day. So day on day off. I think they might have split the two and had two patrols. And there was one spot where there was a tree fell and underneath the tree was a dead Jap, in the gap was a dead Jap. And we used to say we had to kiss him to get under it. you couldn’t get over, you had to walk under and kiss this Jap, no

one ever bothered to move him of course. The Japs never did, there were dead Japs all over the place. And you had to be very careful because the track had been mined by our people. And what they did was got as many mortar bombs as they could get, which are very powerful and spread them out along the track about every three or four feet. And then they got what they called FID, Fuse Instantaneous Detonation,

typical army. And it has got to be started by an explosion, you can’t light it. But once it was lighted it is instantaneous and it will go thirty feet, flash, and it will blow up and they used to wrap this around the mortar bombs and attach that to a piece of wire and a hand grenade, hand grenade was in a bully beef can so that when the wire was tripped

the hand grenade would come out, it would fire. And around that was the FID which would start the FID and the whole track back would just explode. Had to be very careful of those because if you tripped over one of those you did the lot. But the thing worked in such a way that the Japs could come one way and the explosion would be back where they had come from.

Well booby traps obviously you lined them so that anybody who came along that track that shouldn’t be, they tripped the wire and got killed. Without anybody being there.

Well that was the one I just described, was that recorded? Well they were mostly trip wires and that sort of thing.

I never saw one. I actually never saw a live Japanese.

Dead. Never looked, they never buried them they just left them there. We at least buried our dead or took them away and buried them.

The Japs I don’t know if it is true, but I am pretty sure it was particularly on Kokoda they were cannibalising, they had run out of food and they were cannibalising their dead bodies. Dead mates. They had no feeling for anything that was their training. I don’t know if you know the story when they landed in Manchuria

in 1935, they were using live Chinese for bayonet practice.

I never saw a live Japanese no.

You could hear them sometimes, certainly smell them. You can smell their camps for miles away. Their sanitation was zero.

Wherever they were they just did what they wanted, wherever they wanted to. Next to where they ate, slept, and they stunk. Down wind you could smell them for miles even in the jungles. We, okay, the only thing I did not see for the four or five months I was there was a roll of toilet paper. But at least if we went to the toilet we dug a little hole, not terribly deep, but we dug a little hole and we covered it up.

And you didn’t do it within fifty or a hundred metres of where you slept and ate, same with urination. We tried to bathe regularly where possible. One place was very handy, along the track particularly from the summit down more or less to Mubo, the track was down more or less all of the way, never straight, more or less followed the contours of the land.

But every now and again from the hill above there would be a weeping of water out of the side of the hill, the side of the track. And you would get a piece of bamboo say a half a metre long, and you would split it in two, take out the individual pieces, there is a little bar between each insengence [?], cut that out. Cut the last one piece into a point,

stick the other one into the mud and the water would flow out of that. And it had a name, and we used to drink out of them and we used to also wash under them, and they were called ‘pissers’. Actually it was a very apt name. That’s how we did it, I don’t ever remember the army in the five or six months I was there supplying me with water. Except in Wau probably. Everywhere else you

just filled your own water bottle. I certainly never used the detesting, it was supposed to be in case the water was contaminated, it could have been, could have been dead Japs above I don’t know, but that was the risk. Where you got a pool that was different. One, sometime later I had a pool, I hadn’t had a bath or anything for days, a week I don’t know. Probably stunk to high heaven but everybody

did so it didn’t matter and we came to a camp and it had this beautiful pool, fifteen or twenty metres in circumference more or less, water running in one end and out of the other. And I was absolutely filthy. Hadn’t had a bath or anything like that for I don’t know how long. I don’t think I had had a bath, I had had washes under the pissers but I hadn’t had a bath for I don’t know how long. And so I took my pay book out

of my pocket, took my watch off, cigarette lighter etcetera out, pay book out, everything I owned like that I took out. Left my hat and boots on and walked into the pool. Took my hat off, washed that, put it to the side. Took my boots off, washed them, the socks and all of my clothes. Washed them. got my soap out had a bit of a wash myself, got out and got dressed in wet clothes.

Mostly no. No I mean the hills were straight up and I would still rather walk up the hill and down. Do you bush walk? Which do you prefer, down hill or up? Downhill it gets you behind

the thighs, you start running, you can’t stop. I am talking steep hills not just down hill. On just one crutch I find it very difficult to walk down even mile inclines, because it is more difficult to go down than go up. Okay going up your heart beats, you puff and you feel it, but it is nothing like coming downhill, particularly with a pack on with everything you own.

We were used where necessary in any thing that fitted at the time. We cut trees down to make telegraph poles. We were used on one occasion, which I will never forget, A company was trapped by the Japanese and nobody ever moved at night,

except somebody decided to move us at night. And it was the most frightening thing I have ever been in. You read about them in Vietnam they used to put people in lightless rooms, correct? With no light at all. The jungle during the day does not see any sunlight, no sunlight hits the ground in the jungle. You have got the canopy over the top and at night the canopy is like a roof. There is no light,

a complete absence of light. They decided to move us and it is the only time I ever knew of anybody being moved at night. Away we went, I have no idea of time, I was carrying a Bren gun at the time and a Bren gun is very heavy and very long, and the only way to carry it is across your shoulder. The muzzle out the front and the butt out the back. And we were walking along this track, uphill mostly, the track,

if you wanted to call it that. It was mud, pieces of mud. And we’re walking along and every time the bloke in front stopped I hit him with the front end of the Bren gun and whenever I stopped the poor bloke behind hit the butt of it. anyhow this kept going for God knows how long, it seemed like three years. And we walked along, there was a root

along the path and I tripped over. And I got up and I walked two or three paces and tripped again over a similar one. And I got up again and walked another two or three paces and tripped over again. And I stayed down and cried, not with pain but with absolute frustration. And in the book the unit book it mentions,

not me crying, but it mentions the night movement, and it finishes up and he is quite right, ‘No one who was in that, movement will ever forget it.’ Sorry. I don’t. We helped, we got A company out of trouble and when we finished a few days later we came down that track, oh we stopped a little after that we stopped and got off the track

and waited until daylight and we finished the last part in about half an hour. Coming back down the hill, I think it took us about half or three quarters of an hour, and it took us four or five hours to get to where we got to. But it was the moist frightening experience anyone can have, absolute blackness, you cannot see a thing.

Imagine it. Keep going.

Oh we just gave them fire, support, we were told what to do, it rained all of the time of course and we were told what to do and we did it, and they came out about two days later, they weren’t very knocked about but they had

been trapped. I don’t know if it was a bad decision, somebody didn’t know what was happening, but that was all, it was the job. You did it.

Well if you have seen World War I and even World War II, there is a certain front,

particularly in World War I they advanced, the whole army advanced, but here it was guerrilla fighting, that’s the only way to explain it. you were small parties. And the beauty of Australian infantry and I am one of them, the infantry thinks. And if the sergeant or an officer says, “We’ll do it this way.” A soldier might say, “Well look

sir,” or “Look mate” if it is a sergeant, “What happens if we do it this way?” and both the officer and/or the sergeant or whoever is in charge will listen. The Americans don’t. that’s why they have such high casualties. The Americans rely on fire power, they would rather spend a million dollars in bombs etcetera,

but in the end, and I heard this on the History Channel, quite true. No matter who bombs who and what have you, in the end all wars are finished by the infantry.

Immediate. There was no training period. You learnt by experience, is there a better teacher?

Native population no. Native carriers yes. I never saw a Mary, all women are called Mary’s up there. All natives regardless of age were called boys, I know in the modern age you can’t say nigger or boong. They were boongs.

There were three kinds of boongs, and boong is an Australian word. A boong was originally an aborigine. A boong them became an American boong, American blacks, a boong was a native it wasn’t a derogatory term, it was an identification. If people think it was a derogatory term they are wrong. Instead of saying Negro

or Negro American you say a boong, Yank boong. Boong carriers. Boongs saved my life.

Yes right.

I didn’t wake up, I was awake all of the time unfortunately. No I hit the ground, and I knew more or less immediately because laying on your stomach after about ten minutes is not very happy

and I tried to turn over.

What do you mean? We were on patrol, doming back from patrol, coming back for breakfast. We hadn’t had breakfast, and we had had the stoush with the Japs and we were just returning happily and didn’t know that they had come around behind us. Sand this I would say one man with an LMG, Light Machine Gun, just hid himself and opened up and typical Jap he would have just then disappeared, he wouldn’t have stayed there.

Now five out of the eight were wounded. I got hit in the leg, Jimmy I told you got hit in the shoulder. That for you?

Sure we had advanced and we had a bit of a go near the Francisco River which is a fairly large river and at one stage there

was a very big hill straight behind where we were. And on top of the hill were the mortars our mortars. We were down the bottom and somewhere in the jungle between us and the river were some Japanese. And the mortars, you could hear them. a mortar is like a big tube and in the bottom there is a pin and that pin hits the bottom of

the mortar bomb that shoots it out and then it goes up in the air and drops very silently where they want it. now we would not have been more than fifteen, sixteen metres away from the Japs. And you could hear these mortars go pouf, pouf, pouf as they went. And after a while you counted the seconds it was before they landed. And say it was fifteen seconds, when you

got to fourteen you ducked down in your slitty and the bombs went off no more than eight or ten metres in front. Now one night there were two of us in the slitty, you couldn’t see, in those days you could have luminous watches, you can’t have them these days because the luminous was radioactive.

And I couldn’t see the time so between us we were supposed to be an hour on, hour off, but you haven’t got a clue what an hour is. Anyway I was supposed to be on and a bit of mud hit me and I just didn’t react. It was Jap, all he was after was to know where we were, that’s how close he was. If I had have opened fire or thrown a grenade some others would have known where we were. We just stayed there, laid there in the little

slitty. That’s how close we were. Anyway we got rid of those Japs they disappeared. And then somebody asked me to go across the Francisco River to have a look over the other side, which I did. And I am walking over and the water is about here, it wasn’t deep, nice wide river. Got over the other side and oh God, Owen guns here under water, shook it out had a couple of shots out of it, it worked. Got back

over the river and then we got back on patrol around the Francisco River didn’t see anything and we plaid down one night, I can’t tell you exactly where, it was near the Francisco River, actually a little creekish thing. And the next morning when we woke up about, must have been about five or six, didn’t have breakfast or anything like that. I don’t know if we had a lieutenant with us or not,

the lieutenant was looking after the two platoons, the two carrier platoons, 4 and 5, I was in 4. and we had one lieutenant. I will tell you a story about him. Johnny Rice, he was Tasmanian. And Johnny had been away sick and he had come back., anyhow the sergeant I think it was, I think the

sergeant was with us, he was a Victorian, he had been in Greece and Crete and all of that sort of thing. Very nice bloke, I think he was, in those days a horse wagon driver, a wagon driver for a brewery. Older than all of us. And he said, “Right oh we’re going on patrol” and eight of us went on patrol. And we walked down this little creek, and that’s when we hit the

first Japs. This other fellow, I forget who it was at the time, was with me and we were laying down in the water in this little creek, and that’s where we had a few bursts of gun fire in there, and that’s where we hit a bloke and all went quiet so we regrouped and were going back to have breakfast. We just came around this corner and bingo

we got fired on.

Well I told you, the first thing I don’t know where I was I don’t know if I was standing up or falling, but by the time I hit the ground I knew I had been hit.

I don’t know. Look a burst of fire you can fire ten rounds in about two seconds.

Just pull the trigger and it goes duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. You have seen in on TV [television]. And that’s how quick. I can’t tell you how, I could have been first because I was on the left, but I don’t know. But I got hit there and Jimmy got hit there, and he was standing next to me, was he standing? I don’t know he could have been falling when he was hit. I don’t know and I never will. And the other three blokes that got hit, I don’t know about them I don’t remember who they were,

I know they dint have to be carried, they were walking wounded. And then we laid there, we didn’t know if this LMG bloke had gone or not. They usually did, they usually hit and shot off. We were there about, I don’t know, I got one of the blokes to help me turn over so I was laying on my back, and I lay there and I had a grenade in my hand, and I had the pin three quarters of the way out. Only time I have thought of suicide.

I was not going to be taken by the Japs. And a grenade that close is pretty definite. Anyhow we were laying there and a boong train came along, and a boong train always had an Australian or a New Guinean, an Australian white person

not a boong, and he came along and stopped his boong train and came up and found out what was happening, and he went back to the boong train and they had all of the , they carried everything over their shoulders on poles. They would have two or three cases of bully in Hessian bags over their shoulder, so what they did, they dropped everything and for Jimmy and I they made a stretcher

each. And he came along and he must have known something about first aid because he said, “Is your leg broke?” and I said, “Yes” and he grabbed the strap of my, a rifle strap and used my right leg as a splint, and tied the left leg to the right leg as a splint. And then the natives came along, the boongs came along with a stretcher and I got lifted onto that. Boongs never walked, they always jogged

and they are only little people. I am short but they are much shorter than me. And they are jogging along and Jimmy was behind me or in front I don’t know you can’t se much when you’re lying on your back. And next thing I know I am on the bloody ground falling on my left side, I had fallen out of the stretcher, I wasn’t very happy at that stage. So then they picked me up, and you would have thought they had dropped their grandmother,

you have got no idea. They were literally crying, they were so upset. It was very moving. Anyway I got to the RAP hut, that’s the regimental aid hut. And the doctor I knew, he had been in University in Sydney at the same time as my first cousin Bill Richards. And we knew each other and he had a look and he wrote on my file, he doesn’t admit it now,

‘not broken by clinical methods’ I could still move my toes so he reckoned it wasn’t, I knew the bloody thing was broken. Anyway they left it splinted. Then the intelligence bloke came along, a couple of blokes in what they call the I section, asking me what had happened. And I was using the I think the foulest language I could ever think of,

every second word was expletive, I wasn’t very happy. And at that stage Jimmy died And as I say I had seen plenty of dead bodies and, not a mate. Jimmy, not being a snob here but Jimmy and I would never have met in civilian life and yet he depended on me

and I depended on him, we were mates. And when he died I was using the foulest language and I looked over my head describing what had happened and I saw the padre, Father O’Keefe and I said, “Father I am sorry.” And he said, “Forget it son. “

Please don’t say passed away, he died.

No one passes away, passes on goes over or anything like that. They die, please use that that is my wish it is it is a fact, there is no euphemism in it they die. You die.

“Forget it son.” He never said anything more. That night I was operated on and

I think the operating was a table, I am not sure probably a demountable. They only operated at night because of the heat and they had what they call a surgical team which incidentally came from the hospital I finished up in, the 2/5th and there was a petrol pump light, that was the light they operated on .And I had never heard of a thing called pentothal or anything like that, the only thing

I knew was ether and I am waiting for the ether mask and one of the orderlies said, “Stick out your arm.” So I stuck out my arm. And he said, “Count backwards from a hundred.” I said, “Ninety-nine,” and the next thing I knew it was next morning. And I was in what was called a Thomas splint which is probably the most uncomfortable thing that God ever put life into. It is a round leather covered ring, that goes right up into your groin and

there is two pieces, steel rod, about as thick as reinforcing rod. And down the bottom it is bent or joined. And they still use them for broken limbs or anything like that. And what they used to do, say the limb was broken here they used to use those and set it and put tension on it and you stayed in a Thomas Splint.

But it was right up in the groin because my wound was right up there. Anyhow I was in the Thomas Splint and within twenty-four hours it was fly blown of course. And the maggots were running around inside the wound, that was good because they only eat the muck of course.

Well I knew my leg was broken, I didn’t know where.

I did know that it was bad because when I woke up there was a piece of gauze around my wrist and when I opened it up there was a piece of the bullet. Now a bullet is round and the outside, after it goes through a rifle has rifling on it and the rifling on this bullet was on the inside., the casing was turned inside out.

The rifling was on the inside of the curve not the outside. So it was an exploding bullet but the neck of the femur is probably one the heaviest bone, the densest bones in the body and it had hit the neck and just disintegrated, and also disintegrated I suppose about two centimetres of bone. If I hadn’t have lost my leg I would never have walked again

because in those days there was no such thing as pins, they just didn’t exist. And I have still got the little ball join around to the neck, the neck as I say about two centimetres has disappeared, and then the rest of the femur, but there was nothing to join. There was no pins. Even if there were pins I don’t know what they would have done. I would never have walked and probably would have been a wheelchair job.

If I hadn’t have lost my leg. Careless losing a leg.

Oh yes very much so, in fact one of the male orderlies, they had male orderlies, one of the orderlies was a Jewish fellow from Newcastle and he knew my family. and the surgeon who operated on me, when he came back to the

2/5th and I had lost me leg he said, “My God what happened to you, you shouldn’t have lost your bloody leg!” I said, “I lost it all right.” Then I told you it was fly blown and after a couple of days they took me out of the Thomas Splint and they put me in what was called a double spiker. And a double spiker is plaster of Paris and it ran from my waist to my left toes, only toes were out, foot was covered, and that was

supposed to keep the leg immobile. It had a porthole fore and aft for obvious reasons And then on the right hand side it ran down to just above my knee. So I couldn’t use my right thigh at all, it was straight and I could move my right toes of course I could still move my left toes if I wanted,

I don’t think they did. And that was so the natives could carry me from there, which was near the Francisco River, over a place called Mount Tambu, which the Americans changed the name of course they called in Roosevelt Ridge. It wasn’t after the president, Roosevelt was the Colonel or whoever he was in charge of the artillery, and as typical Americans this very heavily wooded ridge

didn’t have a speck of green on it, not a blade of grass, they had blown the whole bloody thing to hell. It was just dirt. And I was carried over that to the other side that was about three or four days. Finally got down to Tambu Bay, that’s where the Americans had landed, and I was put in a tent down there and on a proper stretcher, which wasn’t much more comfortable then what I was in anyway. I was in this bloody cast, and the next morning,

I slept there that night., I think that’s was the night I saw the American point the bone at himself. I am a great believer in the aborigines pointing the bones. This American had been wounded in the lung, had a bullet in the lung. Now so I was told if you survive the first four or five days with the lung wound you were okay.

And he was in his fifth or sixth day with his lung wound and we were just laying talking there, turning out the lights. He said, “I am going to die tonight.” He did. He was dead the next morning. Funny? No. anyway next morning, I don’t know why they moved me out on the side of the road and there was a typical American with a water cart, it was just a dirt road, and he merrily

walked, drives the water cart and squirts it on me. I called his mother and father and everything, I think it was nearly as bad as what Father O’Keefe was listening to. I used everything I could ever think of. So and so I am just lying there on a stretcher and I get drenched with bloody water. Anyway then they put us on a LCV, there is an

LCV and LCT, LC is landing craft, V is vehicle, T is tank. And they get bigger and bigger, V is the smallest of the lot. There were about four or five stretcher cases on that and we had an option. We were going down to a place called Mubo which was about, nearly a day, and we had two options. We could have the top over in which case we wouldn’t be sunburnt, or we could have the top off in which case we wouldn’t be asphyxiated with the diesel fumes.

So we took the latter and we arrived at Mubo and by this time it was dark. And I got carried into a Copra House. Concrete floor, huge building. I don’t know a couple of acres or whatever, huge buildings, copra. There were just stretchers all over. I don’t remember if I got fed or not, and in the middle of a night

I could feel water or fluid along my leg, so I called out, torch comes along. Next thing I know it is tomorrow morning. I had bled under the plaster cast and under the spiker. The bloke, big tall blond gentleman came in, Australian came in, he was an anti-aircraft gunner. I thanked him very much for his pint of blood that he had given me, and I got discharged from the hospital.

They didn’t do anything to have a look why I bled etcetera. That night I got put on the SS Ton Sun all five hundred tonnes of it. I don’t know where they pinched it from. It was a Chinese river boat. I don’t remember much about the trip, expect next morning I got to Popendetta I think. There was Buna, Popendetta, four little places all there. And I got taken to the 2/11th

I think it was, hospital, they had only just set up a little while before and they were completely bloody disorganised. On the way there, I was in a military ambulance., it is built like a truck, it is a truck and I think it was the only time I called out in pain. By this time I had lost weight and I am flopping around inside this bloody

plaster cast and I screamed in absolute pain. And the ambulance driver got out and in those days everybody got morphia. Morphia, morphia, he might have given me a double jab, and then I was all right and we got to the hospital. And they didn’t do anything about my leg, but I had malaria again and they found out that it was positive, they had to test you to find out. If it was positive you got quinine and if it want positive you didn’t get quinine. You were still taking Atebrin [anti malarial drug] of course.

And by this time we just looked like slugs that had just come out from under a damp stone, because we hadn’t seen any sunlight. You had Atebrin which was as yellow as yellow could be. And it just, you just looked like something that had crawled out from under a damp stone, a slug, had no colour at all. Goddamn yellow. So I arrived there and they treated me for that. A couple of days later I got put on a place and it was a DC3 again and it had twenty-one stretcher cases on it.

They hung them on the wall. I was lucky, I was the last on, or the second or third last but I was on the floor. When we got to Port Moresby which was about an hour away, again climbing up to ten thousand plus feet to get over the hump. It is not that far it is just going up and coming down .and we got there and there was an ambulance and they were loading tow or three, two I think. And I was put in this ambulance and there were two hospitals in

Port Moresby at that time, there was the 2/5th which was about three or four miles away from where I landed which was Ward strip. There was three or four strips, Wards was the closest to Port Moresby, and the 2/5th was about two or three miles away. And the 2/19th was about nearly eighteen miles away just at the foot of the hills going to Kokoda.

Anyhow they sent me to the 5th, saved my life. They didn’t know it at the time. Anyway they got me out on the stretcher and they put me to bed. In the 2/5th, the hospital ward, I don’t know it must have been eighteen twenty bed on both sides and in the middle was the doctor and nursing section, and I never saw the other end I think it was the same on the other end.

Huge hospital, eighteen hundred bed hospital. And I had been there no more than twenty minutes and I wanted to use a pan. Now I had no chance of ever getting onto a pan, I couldn’t lever this leg up, so two strong men I must have still weighed a tonne wit hall of the stuff on, got on the pan, whoosh blood came straight up here, down the bottom. You could hear the panic bells going off and the first thing they did, whenever I bled which was often, the first thing they did was morphia.

Morphia and blood at the same time .and when you bleed like that your veins collapse obviously. So I have got cuts on all of my veins where they had to cut the skin to lift the vein up to put the cannula in. Cannulas today are very fine needles, cannulas in those days looked like, I don’t know a pick axe. Or the end of a pick. The tubes were rubber,

the bottles were all glass and litres. And,

Yes. I just laid back and relaxed, I know I am not allowed to say this now, I did say it to a new age woman recently, and got hit from a great height. It is an old saying I used to use and it is not politically correct, and it is not, I don’t believe in it, ‘when rape is inevitable relax and enjoy.’

I can understand a woman being upset, I don’t use it now obviously. But I used to use it, and when something is inevitable such as that what do you do? ‘You can’t fight city hall,’ whatever language you put it in, you’re wounded, you’re being carried back, going at least advancing somewhere, off the floor you’re off the ground. You don’t

have the grenade in your hand anymore. You’re being cared for. Someone has tipped you out and they have cried over you because they tipped you out, they are doing their best.

On the journey, I hand had any breakfast at that stage, I don’t think I had anything that day at all. I would have had drink, fluid, I don’t think I had anything to eat I don’t remember.

Not really, you are just looking up. You are just lying on a stretcher, a boong made stretcher, which is much more comfortable incidentally, well all it is is a blanket between two tree trunks. And a couple of tree trunks across, I don’t know where it is, I have got some photos there and I will show you in a minute.

Generally good. Most of the administration were Australian ex-pats had lived in New Guinea and they became ANGAU [Australia New Guinea Administrative Unit] and they were very good. They organised the native carriers and what have you. Some of the natives were not very happy with the Australians,

and most of them were not very happy with the Japs because they were raping their Marys. And generally using up the, but they got paid, paid in rice and that sort of thing. They didn’t have any money, they got paid in tobacco, I don’t know if you have ever seen boong twist it is the most revolting, they rolled it up and smoked it in newspaper. Don’t even try to give them.

It is about that long, it is a kind of a twist, it is tobacco. See we didn’t have any, you couldn’t have cigarettes in New Guinea, had to have tobacco. Padre walked along one day and we were all out of cigarettes and somebody said, “Have you got a cigarette father?” and he said, “Yeah I have got a brand new pack here.” And he took the cellophane off, and that was the end of the cigarettes. But if you opened a packet of cigarettes within ten minutes

the rest of the pack was ruined. Because, they were what we called tailor mades in those days. Tailor made cigarette had a lot of saltpeter in them and the saltpeter would just absorb the humidity and they would be a sodden mass. So he didn’t lose anything, that was his cigarettes. I tried smoking tea leaves with newspaper on one occasion ,it wasn’t very successful.

Yes the comfort funds were good, salvations were marvellous., the Comfort Funds would be back a little, Salvo’s [Salvation Army] maybe ten minutes quarter of an hour for many action. They supplied a cup of tea, a biscuit where they could,

writing paper, which usually finished up as toilet paper. That was a bit scarce, when you ran out of the family letters, I think my family was a bit disgusted when they found out what they happened to all of their letters, but they were put to good use. They were absolutely wonderful. No Australian who has ever been anywhere near a front will ever forget the Salvie’s.

They just had a little hut, they gave them all names, and the only one I can remember is the Stagger Inn.

Just four posts and a bit of (UNCLEAR) over the top. They roughed it, the Salvie’s roughed it as much as we did. They didn’t actually fight but they did, they fought for us, they fought boredom, they

brought a little bit of home if you can call it., I mean you can imagine going from what March to September without a coin in my pocket, without a note in my wallet. Can you imagine that? There was nothing to spend it on. The pay master had a wonderful; time, he just sat on his backside, didn’t do anything, he just wrote in the pay book

each fortnight .The money was amounting up in your pay book, like a bank book as I said. But you can imagine having nothing to spend it on, no where to spend it and no money to spend anyhow, it is a different life.

Men. Never saw a Mary and I never saw a white woman up there.

At one stage 22 squadron air force city of Sydney squadron, they gave us some support. This is about the time we helped A company. And they were coming in in their A20s which were an American plane, over this most dreadful country, up and down and they were flying between the hills. And we looked at them and said, “They’re mad.”

You know they were flying these planes at a couple of hundred miles or K’s [Kilometres] or whatever an hour. Flying these damn planes and shooting Japs and a couple came up and said, “We don’t know how you can live here.” It is all a matter of perspective.

Okay in retrospect I have had a look at the planning of the whole campaign .

The campaign was to stop the Japs getting a foothold in Wau. Having done that we then, the plan was to progress towards Salamaua without taking it, but to draw troops away, make it look like we wanted to take Salamaua to draw troops from Lae which was only forty or fifty K’s from Salamaua.

And it had its effect. From Wau to Salamaua as the crow flies, as I said was fifty or sixty miles, and it took us, well not me, but from January to September to do that fifty or sixty miles or seventy K’s. And the whole idea was to tie the Japs up. We didn’t want to mow them down, I mean we could have mowed down early but then Lae

would have been much stronger, but they kept on bringing troops into Salamaua and up the track and we kept on moving in. And the Salamaua was taken around about September 15 or 16, I was taken out in August, I missed about by about two weeks. And around about that time the 9th Division landed in Lae and took it and the 7th Division at the same time went down to Nadzab,

the next step and took it all at the same time. And that was the grand plan. We were just silly buggers holding up the Japs for nine months.

No didn’t have a clue. All we knew was that we were fighting Japs. No one came along and said, “Look fellows this is the grand plan.” No way at all. Mushrooms.

Well I don’t know, as I say it is at Eggy Corner.[Ower’s Corner?] Where it is I don’t know, not far from Port Moresby, not far from the coast as far as I know. I never got out of bed there, for three months, I might have put a foot to the ground in the last day but that would be all. Every time I bled as I said I got

immediate reaction and blood. And in those days there was no RH factor [protein in red blood cells], there was only four groups, that’s all they knew, A, B , AB and O and they were numbered one, two three and four. And I was talking to the Red Cross who I am doing something for at Easter, and they said, “How did they know your blood group did they cross check?” “No.” “Well how did they know?” I said, “We had dog tags.” “And what was on your dog tags?” I said, “It had your blood group.”

And I had O plus, and they said, “Was that positive or negative?” and I said, “RH factor hadn’t been discovered in those days you just got blood.” And I suppose there was some mismatch somewhere I would think. But I was lucky I was ordinary O and they just poured the blood in. John Gibson who did the operation, he is still alive, just, his birthday is about seven or eight days from here,

I think the 18th and I have spoken to his son-in-law. He is alive, but I don’t think he is compus mentus, he is ten years older than me. He is in Quakers Hill nursing home. He was very bright last year, but his wife has died, at that stage his daughter had died and no one had told him, she died of cancer. AI think about a

week, or two or three weeks before and his son-in-law, also John, said, “We’re not talking about it.” and he had his grandsons there, and we had a great drink., some of us brought a whiskey out, poor old fellow. But he was a wonderful man. And his biggest complaint to me was when they took the plaster cast off, this is very clean and interesting you will love this, you will go home and have a drink on this one.

When he took the plaster cast off on the operating table the night I had the haemorrhage, all of the muck ran down his legs and ruined his brand new pair of shoes. That’s all he could think about his God damned shoes. I had been festering inside this thing for three weeks. Anyhow they didn’t amputate at that stage. They took me back to the ward and I think

twelve or twenty-four hours later he said, “Look” I think I had had another haemorrhage, I don’t know much, it is all in the report. He said, “We are going to try, we might have to amputate, what do you think?” and I said, “Well if it has got to be it has got to be.” What can you say? Don’t? If it has got to be it has got to be. Of course the funniest thing of the whole lot sometime later, it is also in there, I was reading Pygmalion the original

and I was reading away and I haemorrhaged again of course, and I got carted off to the theatre, I never knew where the theatre was, every time I went there I was non compus mentus. And when I came back the first thing I asked for was my book. And John came in and he said, “What are you reading?” and I said, “Pygmalion.” And he said, “Not bloody likely you have got the thing upside down!”

I think I just said, “How did it go?” Look I was doped with morphine at that stage. They wouldn’t allow me to move, every time I moved I bled at that stage.

The only thing, I could move my arms, I think I could feed myself., might have had trouble drinking because I couldn’t sit up. The only part of my lower body that I could move was this leg which laid on its side, and I used to use it up and down and I finished up with a bed saw right on the bone, I just rubbed a hole in the damn thing. I had bed sores on my back. They say bed sores are bad in nursing,

but when you can’t move and you’re frightened to move the patient. Anyhow eventually it is all in the medical report. The femoral artery was shot, absolutely rotten, I don’t know what diseases I had, I don’t think it was gangrene, they weren’t unknown but a basilis of some sort and there was no antibiotics.

The only thing you had was a sulfanilamide which was a terrible thing. Have you ever had Panadeine forte? Well double what Panadeine forte does to you and sulfanilamide does it in spades. I won’t say any more. And this was a baccillus of some sort and there was no antibiotics, they couldn’t do anything, there was just nothing.

Anyway finally the gave up on the femoral. Fortunately John was a major and the OC [Officer Commanding] surgical was a lieutenant colonel, his name was Angus Murray. And Angus Murray before he joined the army happened top be Sydney’s leading gynaecologist. And to get to the iliac they had to go through the middle here, and

you couldn’t find anybody better qualified to do that. And I have got a lovely mid line incision and when I go to hospital and people ask, “What's that?” I would say, “Oh that’s where I had my first caesarean.” It is a lovely scar. That sort of fixed it. the femoral still bled even after that but I just recovered and by

time boxing day came I, look without my friend, apart from the medical, without my family friend George Amsberg who was a lieutenant navy, he was the head lieutenant man in Port Moresby. He was married, no children. He was a barrister, but he always defended the lower end

of the human chain. He is reputed to say, I think it is an urban myth., but he is reputed to say one time the judge said, “Mister Amsberg if you carry on like that I will have you for contempt of court.” And George said, “Your honour I have nothing but contempt for this court.” I think it is an urban myth. But when I had my heart attack, eighteen months

ago in hospital I was talking to the bloke in the next bed, he looked about my age and we started talking. And he was in Sydney Boys High at the same time as Norma’s brother, Hal was only a year or two older than me, I knew Hal, not well but I had me t him. and we got talking and something came up and he was a policeman that’s right, he had been superintendent of the police, and apparently he was too honest or he would have been chief of police. He was too honest this bloke, retired of

course he was my age. And I started talking about George Amsberg And he said, “Bloody George Amsberg my policemen used to hate him. Because they would get into court and he would tie them in knots.”

He was the head of the navy in Port Moresby at that time. And George was a very good looking tall man, probably in his forties and a lieutenant which is

equivalent to captain. And he had a wet mess, you know what a wet mess is? He had grog. The only one. John and his cohorts were making jungle juice, and there was a hospital full of nurses. And George, very good looking, but he kept my family sane. The army and the Red Cross nothing. The only thing they heard from the army was that he is on the DI [Dangerously Ill]list,

still on the DI list. Still on the DI list. Off the DI list. George was feeding them information, very vetted of course and he was telling them just enough, not to say whether they were running a lottery on me as to whether I would survive the night, which they were. And I was the only one in the eighteen hundred bed hospital but did not sleep under a mosquito net, I refused, I

couldn’t breathe. So they said, “Okay forget it.” I wasn’t going to live anyhow. And I defied the odds. It has made a big difference on my outlook in life. People that whinge drive me mad. I have got lots of old sayings, one is I had no shoes and complained until I met a man who had no feet. And another is only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches.

I don’t know. I never got out of the ward apart from going to general theatre. It was a long ward, there was a bloke across the road who had also lost his leg. He was an air force and somehow or other we agreed to disagree, we used to abuse each other, you have got no idea. And the bloke next door to me much senior to me, I was twenty-one, and he was in his thirties or forties. And he was in

one of these Thomas Splints, he had had his leg in traction. And his exercise used to be to get up and swing his leg up. But he looked after me, I forget his name, I was going to write, I never wrote to him. I have forgotten his name now, he was wonderful. I would say, “I need a glass of water.” or something like that and he would organise that for me. Those sort of people, I have forgotten his name but I will never forget him.

Well I got in there in the middle of September I got out on Boxing Day. Oh talking about Boxing Day George came in, George and I used to talk a lot and George used to cast all sorts of questions, I told you I want under a mosquito net and I used to put mosquito repellent on. And he came in one night and he says, “Oh” picks up the towel and rubs my face. And I said, “What are you doing?” He said, “Wiping the sweat off.” And I said, “You bloody fool

that the insect repellent.” Anyhow we got talking and knowing George he said, “Look when you’re married and when you want to have sex how are you going to get on? Being in the navy I would suggest you get a pair of shear legs.” You know the? Anyhow it never happened. George made the, we had at my wedding., George made the speech to me

and Norma had one of her family make a speech. But George mentioned it in the speech and also John Gibson was there with his, I am not sure if they were married then. Marie came up just about the same time that I did, in September there was an influx of new nurses from Australia. And Marie took one look at John, he was a major and she followed him right through and caught him.

And some many years later Norma and I were invited to the 2/5th AGH [Australian General Hospital] get together over at North Sydney and they all knew me. I was the case that should have died. I was their pet, everybody knew me. Not my personality, just the fact I beat the odds.

Well that’s another thing. About three or four days before Boxing Day I said, “George I am going home.” He said, “How?” I said, “I am going on the Manunda on Boxing Day.” He said, “No you’re not.” I said, “I bloody well am.” He said, “Who told you?” it was called the shithouse radio, you see all of the information, they had a multi-hole toilets. And everybody would be sitting there and they would

all be talking. And that’s where all of the rumours came. So I said, “The shithouse radio.” Anyhow George said, “Bullshit I am the port office, I know what's coming in and what's not coming in.” So to the day I got married, even after that George said he was not aware that the Manunda was coming in. Now that was the first trip of the Manunda after the Centaur was sunk.

Now at that time, the eighteen hundred bed hospital, I believe, had something like over two thousand cases, and in the medical wards they were sleeping in stretchers under the beds. There were no evacuations. The Centaur was some time in June and this was six months later. I got on the Manunda I got back to Brisbane and I had my big tin of cigarettes.

And I have told you what I owned. And I found out later someone smuggled cigarettes off, some of the crew. Put on a train which was the, they got the best carriages and they gutted them and they had double bunks on both sides. And this is where I got that saying that I told you before. The bloke used to come along with water or tea and he would come to the middle of the carriage, “Now where was I when the rope broke?”

Anyway we got to Sydney New Years Eve and the train pulled up at Rose Hill Race Course there is a siding there. Well it is close to Baulkham Hills, do you know the Masonic halls at Baulkham Hills? Do you know the Bull ‘n’ Bush Hotel. Baulkham Hills in those days were five acre farms. Today it is a million dollars for a back yard.

And the other thing was close to Concord, half way between. Anyway Joan my sister had a boyfriend, a fellow American, he thought he was her boyfriend but he wasn’t. but he was a doctor. And I don’t know how he found I was coming on the train., American doctor and I don’t know how he wrangled it, but he went out there, it was New Years Eve, and he actually found me, said hello and introduced himself, and Joan tells me he went home New Years Eve and he was crying.

Not for me, but for the rest of them. That he had never seen so many bad cases. And nobody had been evacuated, I wasn’t nearly the worst. I walked the next day or the day after I think. When I say walked, I got out of bed. Anyway Nat went home and he cried.

You can imagine the whole train load of bad cases. Nobody had been moved. They had had some evacuations, mainly medical and some that could fly, but no stretcher cases I don’t think. And anyhow I finished up in Baulkham, Hills and I get into this ward and there is eighteen beds, nine on each side of the ward, not a soul in them.

All with a bloody Red Cross in a perfect line. Red on white. A big boned nurse came in, nursing sister, I used to call them sisters until a couple of men I have called sister lately, so I call them nurse now. Took me a long time to get away from sister. She came in and said, “My name is Marie Eade what is your name?” I said, “Harold Herman.” She said, “Do you drink beer?” I had had one beer, George had brought a six pack in before Christmas. And I kept one

and gave the other five to mates of mine. And I drank the whole damn thing, it was warm and I was absolutely out. You can imagine, by that time I don’t know what I weighed, but I would have lost probably fifty percent of my body weight. Anyway Mum and Dad came out New Years Day, they got petrol, I don’t know where they got Petrol from and they came all of the way from Bellevue Hills to Baulkham Hills which is a long way, you know well past Parramatta.

And didn’t see much of Dad and my new brother-in-law who I had never met, he had married my second sister. They were running back and forth to the car listening to the racers, both keen racers. And Madge was about this big, and I thought oh God she is going to drop any time. It took until March, she was huge. She tells the story, I think it was three months after she had had the first child, people were still getting up for her on the tram. She was so big. She was a big boned girl. That’s beside the point.

And Mum and Dad were very wonderful, they didn’t cry or anything I don’t know what they did when I left. I was just skin and bone, very hairy at that stage, black hair. Somebody might have given me a top, I don’t think they did I think I just had this pair of shortie pants on, that’s all I owned in the world. And they didn’t cry. A couple of days later I got out of bed and they lent

me a pair of crutches, one of these crutches, not with the seat on. They were the standard crutch in those days, Vet Affairs or Repat they were in those days. And then around about Easter.

I had not seen them, that was, what are we talking about, I got back

43 / 44. I didn’t see them on the way up I think I had had leave before we left Adelaide we came home on leave. So it would have been at least eighteen months.

Then on that day? No I we didn’t discuss it. You know they could see

I had one leg. They knew I had one leg. George had told them I wasn’t very fat, but I could still smile. Look it didn’t worry me. As I said, I knew my mother and father well enough I thought, that whatever they thought they wouldn’t show it.

Nurses? I don’t know there could have been a male nurse I don’t know, I dint need one. Someone would probably bring a bottle or something like that. This bloke who was running up and down with the water or tea could have been a nurse, well not necessarily a nurse but a male orderly. They had male nurses they were wonderful. They operated on the day I got wounded they

were the ones that operated on me. They were dedicated and no none of them that I know even looked like homosexuals those days. I think nursing is a wonderful profession to any, why it was always women, I mean you can blame Florence for that I think, but why shouldn’t men be nurses?

I was in hospital at Baulkham Hills because at this time because my wound was just a straight, the whole thing was open. In other words if you cut my thigh off now you can imagine what it would look like, just a bloody mess. It had stopped bleeding but it had to granulate over before they could do anything. And that granulation took from the time it was amputated,

but lets say from New Years Eve it took another eighteen months at Baulkham Hills before it had all granulated over. I had a number of small operation to remove bits of schluff [?] what they call, that’s bit of bones and bits of metal. And three years ago when I had a lovely dose of Golden Staff, amongst the x-rays I have a small piece of shrap [shrapnel] in my spine.

And I carry this with me, where have I got it? up here, because if they gave me an MRI [Magnetic Resonance Imaging] I would fry. Literally. That’s, I would say it migrated from there right across. They took out bits of bone, for weeks. Before the war

when I went to a movie and saw people bleeding I would faint, I have, I have fainted. When I came back, you know I couldn’t stand the sight of blood even my own. When I got back to Baulkham Hills I used to go up to the operating theatre and look though the window and watch them operating, life changes.

Very easy. The CO was very strict expect for ward 7 which then became G why they changed it I don’t know, for amputations, amputee’s. Now when I got there there were thirty-six beds, thirty-four of us were amputee’s. legs, arms a couple of multiplies. I don’t know where, I can’t find it at the moment, I was at the Bowling Club a few years ago and I was telling stories about amputee’s

and the president said, “Why don’t you write them down?” which I did and he published them. I will tell a few now. One bloke a very big man, a very poor man apparently, lost both legs between the knee. Had to make two decisions, how tall he was going to be, and two, what size shoe he was going to have. Decisions he had to make. They didn’t make his

as tall as he was, because I think he was a very tall man, and a very big man. And I think the optimum shoe size was either seven or eight. That was number one. Number two the Repat in those days, well the army would train you in anything you wanted to be. I know one bloke particularly, he is a New Zealander and the New Zealand government did exactly the same, he became a doctor and I know plenty of others who became doctors. You know just ordinary privates in the army and

they wanted to become whatever. Anyway this bloke had lost an arm and he wanted to be a draftsman. That was okay and he used to go down to the limb factory, that’s what it was called then, now it is a prosthetist. Anyway he went to the limb factory and it was in Elizabeth Street Surry Hills. You know where the Penfolds building is in Elizabeth Street? You know the building across the

road has got all of the housing whatever, do you know what I mean? Well the limb factory was there. And all of the limb makers, virtually all, were all amputees from the First World War. When they came back that’s what they took up and they were carpenters and they made limbs. And in those days they would get a tree trunk and they would hand bore it out until it fitted the arm and they would take a cast and it is made,

and it fits better anyhow you know I am going back nearly sixty years. And he went down and he asked them to make certain things for his hand, he was below the elbow, and in those days all they had was an artificial hand made of wood with the thumb was on a spring and it was covered with a glove. One bloke used to get into the tram and do it deliberately,

just turn the hand around two or three times, little old ladies were dying all over the place. Another guy who walked beautifully, below the knee. A good below the knee you will never pick it unless you know. he lived in Wollongong, he was on leave. He was on Wollongong Railway Station coming back from leave and the foot is held on with a u bolt and two pins, nuts and they slipped and his bloody foot and shoe and

everything fell off, consternation amongst the old ladies. Anyway this bloke with the hand, they made all of these things and he was all dressed up to go home. And I said to him, I forget his name say his name was Bill. I said, “Bill what can’t you do with one hand?” He said, “Harold there is only one thing I can’t do.” And I said, “What’s that?” “Put a bayonet globe into a hanging fixture.” Well you don’t see hanging fixtures these days. So they were a couple of them.

I had one myself, I was walking on an artificial leg down to Woolloomooloo that’s where the factory was, and right next door was the pub the Frisco Hotel, I don’t know whether you know it? Dowling Street in Woolloomooloo. And I had just been out on business and I had just got out of the car and I am walking along the footpath and as I went to walk down the footpath I tripped

and I broke the bloody leg, smashed it, it is aluminium. And it tore my pants to ribbons and there were a couple of big leather thongs that came down from here and the foot the lower leg is going around like this. And there is an old drunk in the gutter and he said, “Are you all right mate?” I said, “I have just broken my leg” hopped back into the car and went up to the limb factory. I don’t think he ever drank again. A couple of funny things.

No. I had to granulate at Baulkham Hills and that took eighteen months. And then I think it was April 45 I transferred to Concord and I spent six months in the plastic surgery. And the, what they call a pedicel graft. Do you know what a pedicel graft is? Well it is like a sausage, in fact whenever they served sausages it was, “Ah pedicels for breakfast.”

What they do, this doctor was Colonel, what's his name, anyway he was a leading plastic surgeon in Australia at the time and everybody knows his work. What they do is cut the skin and turn it under and stitch it underneath and it becomes just like a suitcase handle.

And they take, in my case they took a piece of what they call a dermatone from here, that’s just the top skin, and put it on underneath. Well half of that took and the other half didn’t. and the pedicel took okay. They didn’t do anything in a hurry those days, you weren’t allowed out of bed for ten days, now they get you out of bed as you get out of the theatre. But you laid in bloody bed and the operation took

something like four hours and I had four hours of ether, that evening I brought up everything but the blood moon. Next morning what did we have? Sausages for breakfast. Curried sausages which I liked. And I spent six months there because no one was in a hurry, they would operate on you and you would spend a week in bed and then a week in the ward. And then they would send you out on two weeks leave come back get weekend leave and come back

and you get another two weeks leave. While you were away somebody was using your bed, the next operation. So the four operations took from about April to December and you got to know everybody of course and it started to dwindle a bit but we used to have about eight that played solo, we always had four that played solo but it started to dwindle and it ran out one night there were only three of us and we were whinging that we couldn’t play solo. And the night sister came on and she said to one of the boys,

“Do you play solo?” “Yes,” he said. She said, “I play solo.” We said, “Would you like to join us?” and she said, “Yes.” So instead of lights out at nine o’clock they went out at half past eight except over this blokes bed. And we played solo, halfpenny a trick, very small.

Well first of all I started with a great deal of zeal to learn and get my diploma, I rang the Sydney University, yes if I did the one subject, the economics

as a full subject I would get my diploma. So I got my books out and I sat down and one of the blokes playing cards said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I am studying.” He said, “Oh do that tomorrow.” Manyana [tomorrow] never came. And then I was doing a bit of weaving, the looms from the Red Cross gave, just ordinary weaving. Do you know anything about weaving? Well this was just up and down,

now each one of those things that go up and down are called heddles. No that’s a two heddle loom. What I wanted was a four heddle loom in which you can do patterns, different patterns and different colours by varying what you do with your heddles. And I enquired. Nobody had a four heddle loom. And so I knew that there was a carpentry shop down there in Baulkham Hills for rehabilitation and there was a qualified carpenter down there

that would teach me. So I joined him, and I said, “ I want to make a four heddle loom.” And he said, “That good, the first thing you are going to do is sharpen tools and keep the tools.” So I learnt that. So I said, “Now can I do the loom?” “No,” he said, “First pick something to make.” So my sister had a daughter and she was born in March 44

and this was probably middle of 44 somewhere there. And so I made a rocking chair for her, which turned out very well and she used it. so he said, “Now you can make a loom.” And I made the loom. And then I went back to weaving. Now all of this time as I say I was in Baulkham Hills I was playing cards, and as I say I didn’t go on with the University things, that was a bit hard.

We used to do some funny, well dreadful things. Our ward, ward 7 or G which was the amputation ward. We were allowed to do things that a lot of the other wards weren’t allowed. The colonel there, Colonel Graham was a very heavy disciplinarian. But with us we used to have a free go. We used to play football, kick a football on crutches, most of us were on crutches.

The one arm blokes would push the wheel chairs up the hill to the Bullum Bush Hotel and we would have a gay time up there, you can’t say gay time anymore. We would have a nice afternoon. And then we would have wheelchair races down the hill. It is quite a steep hill, we had a few spills but nobody got really hurt. Another thing, going back before that. After I had been there a couple of days I said to the sister, “I have got no clothes.” “Oh,” she said, “Go down to the Q store [Quartermaster’s Store] and get reissued.” So I went down to the Q store and there was an

elderly quartermaster sergeant down there who had actually been in the Boer War. He had been in the Boer War, First War and now the Second War. He was in his seventies. But he was the quartermaster and he said, “What do you want?” I said, “ I want the complete issue.” He said, “What do you mean?” “Everything, lost through enemy action.” So I signed it, broke his heart, I had to have everything, boots, well one boot in those days, right up to a new hat.

The whole bit, so I was turned out as a soldier. So then I did this weaving, I used to get home quite a bit. Towards the end of 44 actually a relation of a my elder sister called my Dad and said that he had two small cars they are called Morris Eight Forties, they were very small cars, English cars. But they were up on blocks because in those

days the petrol ration was four gallons a month. Four gallons a month didn’t get you very far, and these little Eight Forties were up on blocks and he wouldn’t sell them, they were his travellers cars and he wouldn’t sell them but he would lend me one. So Dad rang me up and I got in touch and said, “Yes I will take it.” so the day was set and I was home on leave. I had a lot of leave. They used to send me home on two weeks leave as long as I could

get my dressings done daily. And so I used to go down to the local hospital and they used to take the dressings down and they would do it for me. People were wonderful. Anyhow Dad and I got in the tram, this was going to rock everybody but I got in the tram. And we went from Double Bay to King Street, walked down to Wynyard Station got a tram and went across to Mosman. Now how did we get across to Mosman?

Trams used to run across the bridge. You know where the on the Eastern Side of the bridge where the cars are? They were two tram tracks. Tram tracks on one side railway on the other. We used to start underground at Wynyard Station, there was a tram station there I think it is a parking station now. And we went across to Mosman went to get in the car. He said, “This is the hand throttle” which was basic. “The clutch and the brake can be

used with one foot or both.” One or either or the two and I got in the car and I drove back from Mosman over the bridge, there was no traffic. No one had petrol, they just drove back across the bridge and went down to behind Sydney Hospital, hospital road, and it is still there a little brick hut, or a house. And the police did the testing in those days, and I had my licence when I was seventeen.

And I went in there and Dad got out of the car and the policeman got in and that was the only time I had driven with one leg, and we went around about. And I think I did the worst thing I could do, some stupid pedestrian walked in front of me and I tooted and I got in trouble for that. So when I got back and Dad said, “How did he go?” and the policeman said, “Well he is a bit rusty.” And Dad said, “Well I won’t let him drive in the city for a while.” And I got my licence.

Oh yes see I used to get the ambulance to drive me, but I was no free, I could drive my way in. when I used to get my two weeks leave I found out that that anyone with two weeks leave could go to a building in George Street with their leave pass and get something like ten or fifteen gallons, and I used to do this every couple of weeks. And they had different people on all of the time so they didn’t wake up

so I always had plenty of petrol. Anyhow that was that. I had plenty of leave and I used to be with Norma, I don’t know whether we were engaged at that stage. Getting back to Norma, my aunt the one that had had two boys and the husband had died and she remarried. She was a real matchmaker. She had a beautiful home, right

opposite Scots College and it was called Tinturn and it now belongs to the headmaster at Scots. Magnificent home, her new husband was very wealthy. And she was a matchmaker, and she was very friendly with Norma’s mother, Aida. And I think it was about March well before I had my car and I was on leave and she invited me to

have a party, a welcome home party and I met Norma and that was the end of me. Anyway we got engaged eventually and got married in ’46.

Yes.

I don’t think I thought about it unfortunately. No I was very naïve,

I think I should have done a lot more research and a lot more, look hindsight is wonderful. We all have it, if we did this, if we did that, so don’t bring those questions up please. We all have it. it is no good saying if you did this, you didn’t? Well somebody didn’t, but you can’t turn the clock back. I have got to say a few things upset me

but people that say, “I have got this wrong with me and that wrong with me” and I say, “Look if you’re really down hearted get into your car and go to the nearest hospital. Go to the children’s ward, go to the cancer ward in the children’s hospital and then tell me how badly off you are. And there is another thing I always say, if all of our troubles were put in the one basket we would all take out our own. We know what we have got and what we haven’t got.

It is no good, he’s got this and I, no way. You live your life. Another thing, I think life is like a game of cards, you’re dealt a hand and you do the best you can with what you have got.

Just on eighteen months and then I was at Concord and went into the plastic surgery ward which was on the fifth floor in the multi story building . I was in

ward five twenty which faces East towards the city, and the other ward was five thirty which faces South. Five thirty was what they called the faucium auxiliary, never went in there actually. They were the faces and that sort of thing. And mine was just general plastic surgery. There were some dreadful procedures with these pedicels because a pedicel can only be moved one end at a time,

and it has got to be there at least two weeks to check that the blood is flowing through it the right way. Now one of the worst operations, not on me was two or three boys, men whatever, had lost the skin on the back of their heels, two of them I don’t know, only one of them I know how he did it. He got caught in a lift and the lift door just took the skin off the back of his heel.

Now they raised a pedicel which is operation number one, and he can walk around. On the second operation which would probably be five or six weeks later, because nobody was worried about time, you would be sent out on leave because someone else was in your bed. So you come back, and the second operation was to put the pedicel on his wrist. And if it was his right leg they were working on it would be on his left wrist. He would be walking around like that and they might limit that to four weeks. And he would come back

and they would check that the blood was flowing, they would then cut it off his body and he would then go down to his ankle and be like that for two weeks in bed. Now you can imagine being like that for two weeks minimum. Three weeks maybe. You couldn’t straighten. They were in absolute agony. Then the minimum time they would

check, obviously they weren’t going to keep him like that, like I would be for six weeks. They would do it as quickly as possible, they would then cut if off his wrist and he could then straighten up, but he couldn’t, it would take him three days to straight up. And that was probably the cruellest one I saw. The funniest one was an older we were all in our twenties still. One bloke came in, he must have been in his forties he had joined the army, I

don’t know if he had even been overseas but he had a hair lip, he had been born with a hair lip. And they decided to repair it. I think they first thing they did was knock a couple of four teeth out. So that was done. And then they did the operation and they sutured his two lips together leaving a hole where the two teeth came out and he had a little teapot with

a piece of rubber and that’s how he ate and drank for two weeks or so. Oh but the blokes used to take him up to the pub, order his middy and pour it into his teapot and drink.

Right that is another question. The day the war ended everybody

in the hospital was given two or three days leave except me. I had been operated on about a week before so I wasn’t allowed out of bed. So I spent, with about three or four others in this big ward, must have been forty patients, two or three of us in there. The did give us a bottle of beer each and my father-in-law to be and wife and mother-in-law and all of the family came out. But the funniest one was one bloke was having an

operation, a plastic surgery operation, which are never terribly urgent. And the in those days they gave pre-med was a morphine and atrophin, morphine you know what that does an atrophin dries you up that was the deal. It was about eight in the morning, he had gone into theatre, he was on the table and the news came through that everybody was to get three days leave. And the colonel said,

“Do you want me to go ahead with the operation or do you want to go on leave?” he said, “I will go on leave.” He said, “Okay,” got off the table got dressed and walked out, morphine and all. True story.

The radio I think, everybody knew. But the day they dropped the atom bomb, my father-in-law to be was very straight laced. He was a pharmacist, he was 2IC [Second In Command] at

Parks Davis. Very tall good looking gentleman, he had no business go in home. He was in partnership with this couple and they duded him. so he had this job, he would never have made manager he just didn’t have the push to do it. He was a wonderful man, had knowledge, knew Latin, in those days to get his pharmacy he had to learn Latin. I don’t say he could speak in Latin but,

anyhow on a day or two after the atom bomb was dropped, he came in with Norma sand her mother, we might have been engaged I don’t know. He used to get wonderful jokes, because being 2IC the police various squads of the police used to come in and ask about drugs and they used to always used to have wonderful stories. So he came in and he said, “Do you know they call the atom bomb the VD [Venereal Disease] bomb?”

And I said, “No why?” He got this from a copper. And he said, “It goes off with a clap and you don’t know whether you’re gone or ‘ere.” So no they were wonderful people. Anyhow then when the plastic surgery was finished, I stayed in the plastic surgery ward and I was taking up room. I was out most of the time, I had about three lots of two weeks leave, and I said to the sister

what was her name. She ran the place, if she said, “Jump” the colonel said, “How high?” The colonel was married and had a family in Melbourne which he eventually divorced and married this sister, she was a captain as I said. And I said to Sister Thomas they married in the finish and they used to live in Rose Bay and I used to see them quite often. I said to

Sister Thomas, “This is stupid I am taking up somebodies bed here, why can’t I go out on outpatient?” “Good idea.” So I went out on outpatient and I had my car and I used to go home. I was married by then, yes I was married and lived down at Norma’s place and used to go home and take of my uniform. Once a fortnight I used to put my uniform on, go up to Victoria Barracks,

collect my pay and ration coupons and go back and take my uniform off. I did that for about three months. I used to go in also to go to the limb factory to try my leg on, I eventually got that. And then in October they discharged me and I didn’t really lie. The bloke said, “How much leave have you had in the last year or so?” so I said, “I wouldn’t have clue.” Which was true.

I wouldn’t have a clue how much leave I had. So he said, “Look the maximum I can give these days is ninety days.” So I had my ninety days army pay, I had my deferred pay. My pension started the day I got discharged. And what else? I had all of these pays, about four days later I hoped in the car with my pregnant wife, went up to

Leeton and started getting paid there.

I don’t think so, she never really asked I don’t think so. I hardly talked to anyone about it and that was Jacks bitch that I hardly talked about it. and as I said to him, “Nobody ever asked.”

This was in the ’90s and Jack came to me and said, “Dad you have never told us about the war,” and I said, “Nobody ever asked.” And he said, “Will you talk about it?” and I said, “Yes.” And so he brought along a tape recorder and that’s where the website started. Now he is interested in it.

A necessity unfortunately.

War should not be but it was. If the, if we hadn’t have gone to the war against the Japs well this country would be Japanese. It nearly was except for one thing, the Coral Sea. The Coral Sea Battle changed everything, and Kokoda. But what the Americans don’t tell you is, the first time the Japanese were

ever beaten on land was at Milne Bay and that was an all Australian venture, and that was the first time the Japanese had ever been defeated on land.

We hardly saw them, I only actually saw one American before I was wounded, and he was coming down a place called Observation Hill. There is

always an Observation Hill in the army, they always give the same names. and we said, “Hi Yank how long to the top?” we never said how far. And he said, “Well it took me twenty-five minutes to come down.” And so we though oh about two and a half hours. About two and there quarters, three hours later we got to the top. I got to the top and I had malaria again. So the

information we had was to go along this track, when you get to a T turn left and you will get there. So the boys left and I was left with the tailor. He was a bit of a bludger I think I don’t know who he was or his name. And I said, “Look I am going back down to Mubo to the RAP.” So I left all of my gear, just took my rifle and what have you and went down the hill again, yes it

was twenty-five minutes to get down without gear and so on, but I still hated going down hill. I went to there and they took my temperature and they said, “No back you go.” I think I was only about a hundred and one, so that didn’t count. So back up the hill, which was easier without gear so I said to the tailor, “Come on we’ll go.” And he said, “No I am not going.” So I went up and I got to the track and I turned left

and I could hear footsteps. Had all of my gear of course. And I just got off the track and laid there and saw two Australians and I said, “Hello.” And they were a bit surprised and they said, “Where are you from?” I said, “ I am from carrier platoon.” He said, “Where are they? What were their instructions.” I told him. he said, “Oh the bloody fools they weren’t to turn left they were to turn right.” They finished up in Japanese territory.

And this is where I had the bath. I went down and a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes later I found this bloody great pool which I had a bath in, first bath in years. And best bath in years. And it must have been about, I was sitting there relaxing having a bath feeling great. Along came the platoon very bedraggled. I don’t know who told them to turn left, but that

was the information I had, turn left instead of right. But they had been out for two days, they had food with them.

Yes I could smoke while I walked. This hadn’t been invented at this stage. No that was my first reaction ,the first thing I did was light a cigarette and walk up and down .

Actually I had a lot of walking before I took delivery of the leg to try it on. Then I had a plaster cast taken of the stump. See I have got no stump at all, when I walk I actually sit on the bottom takes the weight, I reckon I am the laziest person in Sydney, every second step I take I sit down.

But this was invented by a guy called Stalker who was a First World War amputee. Very, very high apparently. I don’t think it was as high as mine, nearly. He lived in Melbourne, very stout man apparently and he came up with this idea of putting a board across, and he patented it. didn’t make a penny off it, didn’t want it, he gave the patent to the Australian government, the British government, the American government, anyone who wanted it.

And it is called the Stalker crutch seat. And it has been modified, well it looks like the original, but the original didn’t have the gussets in there, I would put my weight on and it would collapse the seat was flat, didn’t have that curved part in it. these all came over the years. But I think I am the only one left who

still uses it, who is still alive to use it. One bloke I did know he worked at Ford in William Street. He wasn’t an ex-serviceman, but he had seen the thing. And he got the mechanics at Ford to make him one out of metal and what have you. But he went one step further, I tried to walk on it and I couldn’t. The seat was on a kind of piston which would go down, it was very hard.

And then somebody made one of these out of steel out of aluminium, I put my weight on it and it would just collapse in a heap, me too. What was the next step? Then somebody got the great idea because these crutches you can’t buy now, you can’t make. Nobody can bend that wood the way that is, as I say I am about the only one, supposed to have only two, I have got three at home I cheat on all of these things. What I do I just send one out every time it needs repairing,

new rubber and new leather, so it is clean .the rubber is the most important. But I get corns on my bum and I go to my doctor and he gets out his little scalpel, and I wrote a sign he won’t put it up on his door, I wrote B U M bum podiatrist.

I don’t think I did have to look, I am easy going sort of thing. As I said do what you can. There is no good saying ‘if’ if is a terrible word. If I had a million dollars what would I do? Would I be any better or worse?

I was very lucky, my business life was reasonable. When I left Leeton I had no job, no money. I mean I had, my uncle gave me absolutely basic wages, Mum fortunately bought a house for me in Leeton which we sold. And then we bought a house in, see five years in the bloody army on five bob a day you don’t save much money.

I got a couple of hundred gratuities and that sort of thing. Norma got a lovely diamond watch for the two hundred and fifty dollars long service pay or whatever it was. No you don’t have a lot of money but I was very fortunate with my parents. Mum was probably in her sixties and she had waterworks trouble, and she went in, lovely bouncy lady,

free and easy, she went in for the operation and from then on, I am sure it was the anaesthetic. She was morose, from then on she finished up in a wheelchair for about ten years. My father doted on her, as I say she was very wealthy particularly when the business was sold, she got a lot of money. I won’t tell you how much. they moved out of the house and Dad was not a businessman, virtually gave it away. Didn’t get half of the value

of it. they picked up a very nice unit on the second floor in Darling Point.

I am lucky to be here. That is my life, luck is what you make it.

I am still here, I am still here. I am still breathing, I enjoy meeting people, I enjoy helping people. I don’t push myself on anybody But I would like what I am doing with the Red Cross I would like them to use me, use my experiences of being saved by

sixty-four people, that is important to me, those people are all dead, the people that saved my life. I am not dead because of them.

Complete and utter couldn’t have done without them., remember I mentioned being down on the Frisco River, some of the boys got wounded, not in my platoon

but, remember I mentioned the mortars were up the top? Where I mentioned the mortars were up the top, four or five of us on an ordinary stretcher endeavoured to get this bloke up the hill. It was sand. I have never been again nearly as bad as the night, so frustrated. Go forward tow and drop back one. And we finally got this poor bloke to the top. I don’t know who he was, what happened to him or where he came from.

But we helped him and we didn’t do half the job because he was on an ordinary stretcher. The native, I will show you, I can’t do it on the tape but I will show you what a native built stretcher looked like. And it could have been me because this particular picture shows a guy being carried across the Francisco River which I had crossed on my own good feet, being carried across by

natives, his left leg was in a bandage. It could have been me except it wasn’t. but it was the same sort of stretcher they made for all of us. It wasn’t comfortable, but they were able to, well they couldn’t walk in those conditions, around corners, you have got no idea of the hills. You have got to be there to see the country. If God flattened it out it would be the biggest

country in the world.

Yes I have a lot of thoughts. I think Saddam [Hussein] should have been stopped but I don’t thick Bush should have done it unilaterally. I think Bush is pushing his own barrow, I think he is trying to redeem what his father didn’t do, and that was get rid of

the thing ten or twenty years ago or whatever it was. I think America hasn’t got a clue on how to run a war, how to do anything. All they have is money. And the world doesn’t like America. I still think we should have put our token force in. Remember this, how many casualties have America had?

Okay they have a lot more people than we did, but we had two hundred men behind enemy lines not one casualty. Right? Not one casualty, not even a broken toe nail. Because our army thinks. Americans don’t they do what they’re told. They don’t think. We used to have this saying ‘

boy’ in New Guinea. The Americans, “Boy how we roughed it, three days without ice cream.” And they had laundries they had mobile laundries, they had ice cream, they had the best food. We were lucky to survive on the food. Okay probably we were on the wrong end of it. but Americans would always spend two million on heavy artillery barrages rather than move one man. I admire that but it is no way

to win a war., in the end it comes down to hand to hand. Man against man. You can wipe the other people out with an atom bomb, sure that’s the finish but you’re no further ahead.

I used to go to Anzac Day. in the old days, first one I went to Norma drove the car around. And then it got too difficult, I used to go with the limbless, I never went with my own unit, remember my unit was Victorian. And there is not that many here, yes I am a member of the unit, sorry our

our New South Wales area is now sewn up as far as the 2/7th and we have now joined the 7th RAR [7th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment] and they have taken us on board as guests, as honorary members. And we get there in, I still get the information, it is still strong in Victoria because it is a Victorian unit and there is a lot more people there. I mean the number of New South Welshmen was very few.

I have been to a couple of their meetings in Sydney but they meet on the Thursday, pension day and they meet in the Catholic Club which is a very nice place, but for me it is not easy to get to. I can get out of the bus somewhere in Elizabeth Street but then I have got to walk too far. Unless I can park, I am lazy in that. But I mean it is no fun walking. But I must admit I

still play bowls and I do a bit of walking there. Only walk twenty-two yards and then sit down. I try to do as much walking as I can to stay fit. I am reasonably fit. I don’t over eat, I went to a dietician and she looks after me. I live reasonably good health. Last trip I went was overseas in ’98,

Alan Wright my best man, his widow, we went overseas and did Spain and Portugal. Yes we shared a bedroom, we didn’t share a bed but that was her idea not mine. And we worked very well. Both of us could have afford single supplement, but if you have ever travelled alone, it is very miserable at night. You have got no one to talk to when you go to bed, you’re cut off

from everybody if you’re on the bus tour. And Margo and I got on very well. And I still see her quite a lot. We get together. She lives in Northbridge is which is a bit difficult, I don’t think she knows where the Eastern suburbs is, at least I know where Northbridge is. Portugal was great because we had a good guide and a lovely tour. The guide was wonderful. Spain was absolutely hopeless, we had a forty-nine seat bus and on the night before we left they found they had fifty people. So

they sent the bus back and they put another two seats in, the poor people sitting on one side couldn’t even put their feet under the seat in front. The guide, she only lost half of the people once. We went to one place I forget the name, I was advised not to miss it. It is a mosque a Muslim mosque and up quite a hill and there was another guy there from Britain

who was not well either, she said, “I would advise you too not to come when the bus gets up to the top it is quite a walk.” I found out later that both Bill, the Englishman and I could have got a bloody taxi up, I mean you spend thousands of dollars getting there, could have got a taxi up right to where we wanted to go.

I am glad to see that it is not dying. That the younger generation, kids that high are joining in. I forget the RSL diggers only, that is crap, the whole country should rejoice. Not for Anzacs, for the people before them the ones who went to South Africa, for the

bow and arrow war the 1914 -18, our war, any wars on. I don’t like war, I have got great reasons not to like them but sometimes you have to stand up and be counted, every country every person. Stand up and be counted. And if you let people walk all over you that’s exactly what they will do. I don’t like violence, I have got no inkling of liking violence,

I think it is terrible. As for domestic violence and gratuitous violence, road rage, no way.

Okay.