Australians at War Film Archive

How much time do I have?

I was born in Cootamundra on the 23rd July 1921 and I went to school in Kyogle, Moree, Boggabilla, and that’s it. My father worked on the railway lines so that is why we were moving around the countryside and eventually we came to Kempsey in

1935, ’34 – ’35. And I went to school at Kempsey High School and I worked for twelve months for an accountant in Kempsey and then from there I went to the tax office in Sydney and was there all the rest of my working life.

Yes. I was in the armoured corps and we went to Tamworth for training and from there went to unit camp down at Albury, still more training and then back to Singleton to train with tanks, Lee and Grant tanks and from there we went to Puckapunyal in Victoria where we thought we were still in a training regiment

and then we were eventually transferred to Toorbul Point, which is up in Queensland, just out of Brisbane, near Bribie Island and I there joined the 2/9th Armoured Regiment and I was with that regiment until I eventually went to Japan in 1946. We moved from Toorbul

Point to Glasshouse Mountains where we prepared our unit to go to New Guinea. But they decided that the tanks weren't the best thing for use in New Guinea so they sent a tanker, another regiment that had a lot of tanks. From there we moved down to Southport and we spent six months in Southport and of course that’s on the

Gold Coast, so we had a pretty torrid war, at that stage, then we did your training with mainly ship tanks, mainly tanks out of, on boats and then leading them on the beaches as would happen wherever you go. We went from Southport up to

Wondecla which is on the Atherton Tablelands and we trained there with the 6th Division and we spent some months there and then the same thing happened, the 6th Division went away and we were left behind. So then we were transferred over to Ravenshoe, which is not far away from Wondecla, and we were training with the 9th Division. And we trained there for a couple of months and we eventually went away with the 9th Division,

and in May of 1945, the war was nearly over then but however we got our journey in order and so we went by ship to Morotai and we stayed at Morotai for a couple of nights getting organised to go to Borneo, so eventually we went on landings of tanks from Morotai to Borneo

and we landed at, on the west coast part of our flotilla, whatever you like to call it, it was one way, and we went to a little island called Muara Island in Brunei Bay. And in approaching Borneo, we had the English destroyers behind us and when we came within range we had all these

rockets firing above us, going overhead and that was our first information of what landing on a foreign soil was like. In any case we landed on Muara Island and our landing ship tank dropped the front and away we went and our tanks just up on the level of the island and the island

was covered in holes where the bombs had been dropping on this particular island from Morotai and other areas, and of course they thought there was a submarine base there. In any case, our tank had stopped so we all go out and had a look around and we alongside a big crater and in the…

We, (UNCLEAR) for the night and we went on to the mainland and we moved down into Brunei township and we then went onto the aerodrome and we stayed there for a while and then

we went down to a place called Miri, which was down along the coast, about where the oilfields are. And that’s where we stayed and that’s where the war finished on the 5th of August.

He was a fettler. Working on the tracks, repairing tracks and keeping them in order, that was initially and then

eventually at Moree he became a driver. He was sort of a driver of the trains going up and down as the railway line was put in and that was what he was doing. But when, that was in the middle of the Depression of course, and when the railway line finished, he went back to Kyogle and he worked in a sawmill, but then he got back working in the railway again

and that’s how we eventually came to finish up at Kempsey.

Well the railway system was that they have a trolley which they can carry the gear, which you lift up and put on the tracks and they push up and down and away they go, but at that stage I was only about two so I didn’t have much knowledge of that, but that’s

the system that they used. That can be lifted off anywhere while the trains are coming past and that’s as far as I know about what he did there.

Initially when he joined the railways, he was working on an area where the railway line had been down for donkeys’ years and so they had a fixed area of say five or ten miles either side of the town. And that’s how they used those trolleys to move about. And at a later stage when

he rejoined the railway department, after the Depression was over I think, when we were at Kyogle and he had, he was travelling then and he was away for all the time, there were occasional visits back home but I often visited him when he was working at various towns, I stayed with him for a fortnight

during school holidays. But in the finish of his career, he was in Sydney so he was sort of in between stations so it wasn’t very far, most of the time.

A six by six tent. And I shared a bunk with him and I was about ten or eleven at that stage

and I was ever a fisherman so I did fishing. I fished up and down the coast.

In the construction camps at Moree it was slightly different, there might have been thirty, forty, fifty people, all living in tents and they shifted mile by mile as they got the track down. But…

I’d travel by train and I always got a pass because Dad was working the railway lines, so got a pass to travel by train.

Well it wasn’t a very technical sort of job

looking after the track, it was more or less shifting gravel and keeping the level of the track, and making sure the gravel was in the right place to make it solid, so there wasn’t much training necessary in that area, Probably the most important part of that training would have been to be aware of when the

trains were coming through, in that the people who were working who were keeping an eye out for trains, didn’t miss the fact that people were working on the railway lines.

I would say three or four. Haven’t got any memories of Cootamundra, except that Don Bradman was born there.

Of course you’d (UNCLEAR).

To Kyogle. That’s up on the northern rivers, near the Queensland border, and when we went to Kyogle he was working on the construction of a railway line, which went from Kyogle up to the border of Queensland.

And when we were in Kempsey, I’ve forgotten the question again.

Typically farming town, dairy properties, some growing of grain. It was an interesting sort of a town. But, yet while we were there it had been hit by the drought, by the,

what’s the word, the Depression. And the jobs were hard to get and that’s why he got a job with the railways but when they closed down, he then moved over to Moree and worked on the railway line there and when that work cut out, this was around 1933 or 1934, we went back to Kyogle again. And then

up to a place called Cougal on the border of Queensland and then he joined the railways again and he did his travelling down around the Gold Coast.

I don’t think it would be visible because it would only be visible in

times when people came to town, if you weren’t in business in the town you wouldn’t notice it so much. But just the overall effect. I don’t think anywhere while that depression was on there was any real effect on towns except when they had large numbers of railway workers, a lot of the economy went into the local area.

So the effect was there, but the main effect was the lack of jobs.

Well yes there were swaggies [swagmen], as they call them, carrying their swag, there were lots of songs about that and that was true. Of course people were moving about trying to get a job or in lots of cases to get a handout, as they moved through wherever

they were. And even at Moree, we found some of those people travelling like that. And I could always remember my father; he was a smoker and would always give them a smoke. Not that you had anything else to give them, so things were pretty tough. We spent a lot of time in Moree and things were very difficult. I met a fella who had been in business in Moree during the Depression and this was

some twenty years later and I said, “What was your main memory of Moree during the Depression?” He said, “Well, there were more dinner times than dinners,” which was true.

Walk. No other way to move at all. I suppose where there was a railway line they were able to get lifts on those

because particularly in areas where they were constructing, because you didn’t have carriages as such, you had flat carriages and you could jump on the train as long as it wasn’t going too fast, and that’s the way they travelled. But off them it was by foot.

Well just chopping wood for someone in a village,

but there was very little work to be found anywhere, that’s why people were moving all over the country. But it was a difficult time but of course being the young age that I was, I enjoyed that because that was an adventure as far as I was concerned, because we moved to all these places that I had never heard of before, but

yes we met a lot of those people who were travellers, and it was a real problem. And that was why at certain times, the railway wanted people, there were plenty of people to be working. I know that as kids we got to know a lot of the people who were working on the railway who might be living away from the swaggies but they came from all kinds of Australia, mostly from Sydney.

Well that’s why they did this construction work. There’s always been a railway line to Kyogle but then it moved, that’s where it stopped and during the Depression they started that, building that line

to Cougal on the Queensland border and that gave work to hundreds of people. The same thing happened at Moree. Most of the people were from Sydney where there were more unemployed than employed people at that stage. So that’s where all the people came from. There were always plenty of people looking for work.

It didn’t affect me really, to a degree in that my father was working half the time during the Depression, particularly at Kyogle and Moree, and we camped on the railway line as it was being built

and we lived in tents. In Moree, it was hessian more than tents and we were in tents all the way up to Boggabilla. And the same happened when we got to Kyogle. We went to, Dad worked in a sawmill in Cougal, which was on the border, and we built a tent house again.

So that, people, lots of people complaining how tough they had it, but when you get down to basics and you’re sleeping in tents, it’s not the best thing that you could look forward to. But it was an experience.

Well there were, I’ve got a brother, so there’s Mum and Dad and

brother Alex, he’s in Kempsey. And so in all there was the four of us. Just digressing, when we got to Cougal, they brought twenty or thirty people from Sydney to be employed there and they arrived there and all they had was tents, no food, nothing else. So my

mother opened up a boarding house, and so put it this way, it was a non-resident boarding house and she provided meals for the workers and she had a contact with a store in Kyogle, and she was able to get credit to provide all the food she used for

these people who were on the line. And when we left Cougal, she owed the store in Kyogle a hundred and twenty pounds and there was no way in the world of paying it back, so eventually when they got back to Lithgow, she got a job in the small arms

factory and she paid it back during that time. So had a debt over her head for a long while but she got rid of it eventually.

It wouldn’t be more than a couple of months, probably even less

than that.

Well we had two tents, six by sixes, you know, just the one-man tent. But it was probably a ten by twelve tent and you put up the two tents facing each other with a space in the middle where we used canvas to

kind of make a cover so it actually had two sleeping areas, one for the kids and one for Mum and Dad and then the middle we had the living area.

Most of the furniture that we had was from kerosene boxes. Kerosene was put in four-gallon tins, square tins, and a box had two tins

and so these were scrounged everywhere and everyone made furniture out of these, what was available, this was particularly so at Moree. There were certain people over there that were pretty handy at constructing things and one of the things that was being made was a port [portmanteau, suitcase], made out of timber. Most of it was

from construction, that held tea, which was probably about ten feet by ten feet square and the timber in that was sufficient to make a suitcase.

Well what happened normally was that you would construct a stove or a fireplace and

enclose it in corrugated iron, we’ve got a corrugated iron roof. And that would have three sides to it facing into the inside and it had a wooden fire, if you were lucky enough to have an oven you could put it in there but otherwise it was of course an open fireplace. Except that it was facing into the middle of the building as such.

So it was pretty down-to-earth. So when you think of the people these days complaining and having a whinge about things, I always laugh.

Mum was a good cook; she cooked all sorts of things. And we bought meat at the butchers

wherever we were, and that would be transferred by train twenty miles away. So it was a bit of a hazardous job to get it still fresh. But my father had a shotgun and he used to shoot a lot of ducks and particularly around Moree there were lots of ducks and when we got to creeks, my mother and I used to do a lot of fishing, we caught a lot of fish.

And particularly when we got to Whalan Creek which is up near Boggabilla, we had our fishing lines and we caught lots of catfish, Yellow Belly and Murray Cod, so that we fed pretty well considering. I don’t know how the other people fared who didn’t have anyone to manufacture stuff for them like the people, the workers on the railway line. But we were

satisfactorily looked after.

Hand line, a cord line and we…to use the cord lines you need a spring, which is a springy bit of gum tree or a twig of the, not a branch of a tree, push it into mud along the side where you were fishing

and the line would be tied around a piece of wood and that would be stuck in the mud too and then you’d tie the line onto the springer and go and sit down. And if the fish grabbed it you could say “Boom,” and you would pull it and of course the pressure of the spring would set the hook. We caught heaps of fish that way. The biggest one I caught was seven

pounds, it was a Murray Cod and that was quite a fish.

Yabbies and shrimps. Now shrimps are like a prawn, they’re freshwater ones and we’d have a four-gallon drum and we’ d punch holes in the bottom of it and tie a bit of meat into the inside of it and throw it into the water and let it sink

and go away for a couple of hours and come back and pull it in quickly and let all the water run out the bottom and we’d pick up the shrimps and the yabbies.

No, well we often talked about the fact that, all these big shrimps that we used to catch. And even the yabbies which were much more valuable and we’d catch these huge yabbies and we’d throw them back because they were too big for bait. Little did we know how things would change,

that they would become the diet of a lot of people.

We weren’t aware of the fact that it was stuff that you could eat. That they were yabbies, no one ate them, as far as I was concerned as kids and of course they chased yabbies all over the place.

My father constructed a, what we call, I’ve forgotten the name that they call it, but it had four legs that faced into each other so the top was a square about two feet square and they put a container, hessian

around this structure and they’d have a couple of levels of it so they’d have timber tied onto it so that you could put stuff in it and they had the hessian down the side and they had a piece of cloth, put it soaking in this water which was on the top and that bit down the side, I’ll get the name of it in a minute, but it worked.

I don’t know what the principle is, but that kept things cool, a Coolgardie. That kept things cool and that kept the food.

You wouldn't keep it for very long, you’d keep it cooked. You’d cook it. That way it was, that’s

the way we kept it. And we didn’t have any problem with that sort of system because most of the time if we got fresh meat, you ate it straight away. And of course we did the same with fish.

Same from a butcher’s shop; you’d get steak and chops and roast beef, corned beef.

There was a butcher’s shop at Boggabilla and there was one at Moree so in between there was not very much fresh meat.

Well wherever we went for a toilet they dug a

hole in the ground and put a shelter around it, made out of hessian. Hessian was a popular cloth in those days. So that was quite a simple way. In the army the same sort of thing happened and we had a hygiene sergeant who, when we were moving around from place to place, say overnight, you’d have to prepare a toilet somewhere and they’d construct a toilet

and they’d cut down trees and put them across where the hole was. And what they would do was they would split it down the middle and turn it splinter side up. Made it very difficult.

Oh no, you had your own.

Well with the engine and the people who were working on it, particularly in the Moree area, we were always about half a mile away from the general camp of the other workers, the ones who were building the road that led to the railway line, because things had changed.

My father was working on the railway line etcetera, that was a railway line that was completely finished, but in Moree and up at Cougal, it was under construction.

She was very purposeful. She would do just

as much as my father did. And of course as we grew a bit older, we would help as much as we could. So it wasn’t an easy life for a woman, not on those railway tracks. I mean you read books about, or how things happened in America, working on railway lines. It was an experience and I’ll never forget it.

The tents were fairly solid. We did have a bit of trouble at the Whalan where we had some galvanised iron, as part of a roof and that got blown away in a storm and finished up in the (UNCLEAR).

Yes well the tents were fairly good because they were weatherproof and so we didn’t have any problems there, but when we were first at Moree, we were at a place called Camurra where the line was started and we had hessian then and a bit of

corrugated iron on top, but the hessian didn’t keep the rain out so we had a real problem, but fortunately in that area you don’ t get that much rain. So it wasn’t a problem really unless storms came along.

Golly what you walked in, people were clothed in

what you walked in. And we didn’t have that much of a problem because my mother was a machinist. She had a sewing machine that was carted with us, a Singer sewing machine. It lasted for so long and she could construct things and repair things. We didn’t have very much money to be spending on clothes, that was a minor matter,

particularly for the kids.

Some of them. A lot of them. Particularly for kids, shorts and shirts and yes she was rather good at that, we were a bit fortunate.

What a change of clothes! No, well, washing

day wasn’t every day like it is with our washing machines now. It was on a Monday; that was washing day. So, I can’t recall exactly what happened with…Mum had a container that you lit the fire underneath it to warm it, to clean the clothes in hot water and that’s

all we had. And so we got by on that.

Well, as long as it takes to pull the tents down. A couple of hours

I suppose and of course they had these flattops on the railway line and you could put stuff on there without having it in boxes etcetera. So bundle it all on a flattop and away you’d go to the next place.

Oh yes, because they were fairly long.

These flattops were used to carry the railway lines and they were probably about twenty foot long. So there was plenty of room on those.

Well we had one engine, steam engine, yeah.

Well we were only

the railway workers. No other camps with people that weren’t employed on the railway line. Wherever we were, particularly so at Moree, the houses were scattered and I don’t think there were between Camurra and Boggabilla there were no other houses alongside the railway line, but there were people who were farmers, who had houses

on their properties that were adjacent to the railway lines.

Yes the engine had a driver and a fireman and a guard, so they were all family-oriented and had wives and kids as well.

Well you’d see them every day but there was not much social contact as we see it today. There was no television, no wireless, we didn’t have a wireless and so we spent most of our dark times in bed.

Well that’s a long story.

When we were at Kyogle, some of the people had radios, the outside world didn’t mean so much to me at that stage, it did to my mother and father.

When we were at Cougal, we were only youngsters then and there was a train, Brisbane Express went through every day and one from Sydney came up and what we would do as young kids, we would get up on the railway lines and as the train came along we’d call out, “Paper, paper, paper.” And we’d get the paper thrown out to us, so we got all the news we wanted.

My father was very interested in cricket, so we’d get the cricket scores that were playing in London etcetera and we didn’t have anything like that at Moree, but when we were at Cougal my father bought a motorcar, an Essex Six, and that was funded by the non-resident boarding house that

my mother was running on the railway line at Kyogle. And when we shifted to Cougal we had to drive up through the countryside and we had about twenty-three water crossings with this car and we got to Cougal and Dad found out he didn’t have any use for it, he wasn’t able to use the money to keep it going, So he took it back to

Kyogle and he sold it to the local garage owner and he traded it in on a radio. Fair dinkum, he traded a car in on a Stromberg-Carlson radio and we had that for donkey’s years. And when we were at Cougal he put a big aerial, had a giant pole that was attached to a stump that was outside,

just alongside of our house, or tent, and he rigged up all the gear so that we actually had most of those people in that little enclave at our place at night when the tests were on. So that was the way we did it, that’s how we got to know what was happening outside world.

Very difficult because

it was a battery operated set which could be topped up at a machine they had at the sawmill. But it was pretty faint, but it worked. But nothing like we’ve got today.

Yes I went to

school at Kyogle, that’s the first time I remember schooling and we did some, I’ve forgotten how to explain it, but through the government provided schooling for people who, by post.

So we got all our literature and our mother taught us exactly what we should be learning so that was the first part of it. When we first got to Moree, we were in a place called Camurra which was about twenty miles out of town and we used to go in by truck to school and that’s where I first met the Aborigines.

And they were at school in Moree, all in the same class. It was quite interesting to mix with those, not having seen them before, and mix with them and that was the schooling there; and when we got to Whalan Creek, which is about ten or fifteen miles out of Boggabilla,

we had access to a school at Boggabilla, but we didn’t have any way to get in. So Dad bought a horse, a long grey horse and it was called – I’ve got a photograph of it there somewhere – and it was called Nana. So we had to go to school every day from the Whalan to Boggabilla and Alex was the driver, he sat in the front and I

was hanging on the back. We had many a tumble because I couldn't hold on. I fell off and he’d come with me and the horse would stop and away we’d go again. Well we were into fishing during that stage, so that this horse was set loose at night and there was a huge paddock that was alongside the creek and up at the road and the horses seemed to stay in one spot all the time.

So when we wanted to go fishing we’d come back and say to Mum, “We can’t find the horses they must have gone a little bit further.” So then we’d go fishing and one day we successfully did that on a Friday and we went fishing and back to school on Monday and when we got there we found it was a public holiday. So the biter bit. When we eventually

got back to Cougal again, we had a school teacher there and it was just across the creek there and the interesting thing about the schooling there was that we had a cricket pitch alongside of our tent that was just long enough so that the ball could be viewed from the school, so we used to play cricket there and if we said we were sick and we had to have a

shortened game.

No I didn’t have any idea, I presume it came through the education department. So you could do it by correspondence. Basically the same thing happens in

lots of education systems, that they do it by correspondence, so it was like the old days.

I can’t remember really, it was mostly geography and sums. Learning how to count and do all those things.

Yes she did, yeah. She was a pretty strict old school mistress.

She insisted on us not going fishing in school time.

Well things were very different for the Aborigines at the time, in that

there weren’t that many of them there, but they weren’t financed, I don’t think, in any way at all and so how they lived I’m blessed if I know. But surely they must have got some sustenance from the government. If you were unemployed then you could get food vouchers and I presume that that was how it happened with them, but

no, they were…their skin was darker than ours but they were no different as kids, we played cricket and football together in the school yard and we were all in the same school, there was no segregation, things were as tough for white and black people then. But yes, there was not a problem as far as we were concerned and it wasn’t a problem with our parents either.

And that was even more so when we came over on the east coast, there seemed to be more Aborigines around but some of them played in the cricket teams, at Cougal in particular there was one fellow who was the opening batsman and the best batsman and his name was Menzie Williams and he was part of the organisation, he lived in the tent down

from where we were. So that in reality, when you look at things, the Aborigines weren’t any worse off than the people living on the railway line to a large degree.

Only the picture shows, that’s where it seems to be, they

had Aborigines in the front seats and the ‘whities’ at the back. Why that was I don’t know but I don’t think that happens these days, well I hope it doesn’t happen. That was segregation but it wasn’t viewed so severely as it is today with the thought of it all.

At Moree we were living on the common, and common is common land in a township, it could be used for all sorts of purposes, so we ended up on the common with our double tented house and we stayed there until we shifted back to

Kyogle again. But we went to Sunday school at the local church and we weren’t that far out of town, we were on the outskirts of town and so we saw a lot of the town when we went to school, because school was right in the middle of town. So we had enjoyable times at Moree, speaking as kids. Wasn’t so good for the parents.

There was no recollection of any stigmatism at all. We were just part of the school. There didn’t seem to be any problems with the schools and segregation, there was certainly no segregation of the kids, that’s seems

to have developed somehow and you would have thought it would have been the other way.

Well you take your friends with you because you were moving from camp to camp with the same people would be a the various camps so everyone was looking

for somewhere to get some extra food or whatever and so that we were friends with everyone, and the only place we would meet new people would be when we would go to a new school. It was the same at Boggabilla; there were Aborigines and white people together at school, but they had a big

camp there somewhere in Boggabilla which was further out of town, same as they had one at Moree.

I was in first year at high school; I suppose I’d be thirteen or fourteen.

Yes, when we moved to Kempsey, he had been working at

Kempsey railway for some months.

Broughton Street, West Kempsey, which is not far out of the main shopping area or the railway station. So we were living in a house for the first time. It’s strange when you hear people talking about houses

and how good their houses are, well you know it was quite a surprise to us.

It had hot water, had a little burner, heated water, a chip heater they call it and it was quite a safe structure, and that was used to heat the water to have a bath

or heat the water to do the washing. And as far as the house was concerned, well we got stuck into the ground and pretty soon we had a garden going in five minutes flat and it was quite interesting to be living in a house.

I suppose as kids there was no real problem as far

as we were concerned but I know that Mum and Dad were very pleased that they were able to get into a house and in a fixed abode.

Cricket, playing cricket for the school and playing football at school. I started high school at Kyogle and

I was doing an agricultural course; of course it was an agricultural town. And when I got to Kempsey, they didn’t have agriculture so I had to switch to other subjects and I was very keen to learn, I was able to become fairly skilful eventually. And I was interested in

business principles, that was the part of the schooling I liked. I seemed to be able to understand it more than most other things, other kids, and so I sat for an exam at the end of third year, which was run by the government, and from there I was selected to go to the public service in Sydney. So it all paid off in the end.

I don’t know, I think it was probably because I was able to pick up what it was all about. And one of the learning things from that was that you have to have a profit-loss account and a balance sheet and it’s got to balance, and I was able to balance these things

and if you went through the whole of the question about book-keeping at school and you got to the end where it should balance and it didn’t balance, well you had time to do it. And so I was a bit fortunate that I was able to do that and to be able to do that, there is a fair bit of skill in it, a bit of local knowledge, so I

was a bit lucky that when I got the exam from the government, I got the big book-keeping question out, so I got first class pass or whatever you like to call it, in business principles.

Played cricket

with the local team, both my father and I were in the one team, playing cricket against all the oldies in the place and my brother and I had been very keen on cricket during our life and he became a pretty, one of the best batsman around the place, and I was a bit of a bowler, so we enjoyed that.

And I found out where the fish were and we used to catch a lot of fish down from the high school and they were mullet and we’d catch heaps of those. There wasn’t much else to do there because of the fact that we were isolated, we didn’t have any transport in that way. My brother had a bike, he bought a bike, or Mum bought a bike for him and

used to use that to drive around to where his working place, and I made friends with an old fisherman bloke who was in the same street and we used to go on bikes from Kempsey out to McGuire’s Crossing which is just up the coast here and we’d spend the weekend fishing and we used to catch heaps of bream. They were good days and

yeah well it was just school days and when my mother wanted me to leave school before I did the intermediate certificate and I said, “No I’m not going to leave, I’m going to get my intermediate certificate.” It was at the certificate I got ‘A’ class in business principles and as a

result of that I got offers from various people in Sydney who were selling information about business principles etcetera. And so that’s how I started on being an accountant of course, because I was working for an accountant in Kempsey.

Well I think that basically she was thinking I might be able to earn some money, to bring in some money, and that is exactly what happened. Yes things were pretty tight in those days. If I hadn’t said that I wanted to be there,

well I mightn’t be where I am today.

I worked for an accountant in Kempsey and I spent twelve months there and then I got a call from the exam I had before, so I went to Sydney in February of 1939 and I worked for the Licenses Reduction Board,

which is a department that controlled the issuing of licenses to licensed premises etcetera, doing the calculations for a cost of a license and from there I moved across to the tax office. And apart from being in the army I stayed in the tax office for ever after.

Well I suppose I was a country hick the same as most kids are that got to school, go from the country to Sydney and I was a bit fortunate in that people in Kempsey that we knew had relatives in Sydney so they were good to take me on as a boarder. So I was

boarding with some people at Bexley and stayed with them for a couple of years and then I shifted to a place where one of my school pals had settled in Dolls Point [Sans Souci]. And so moved down there and eventually moved to a place at Bondi. It was very difficult accommodation in those times.

Pretty hairy existence. I was getting two pound a week and I wouldn’t have very much left by the time I paid my board and a few other expenses. I didn’t have any spare money at all in that time and my biggest pay was when I first joined the army.

Well let me say that eventually people were living in boarding houses, living with people and people would take them in for a cost, and there weren’t that many of them around. I know that some of the people that worked in the tax office with me, they were country boys too and there were a few boarding houses in closer

to Sydney, they all lived together, and it really was a boarding house. So where I was staying, it was a private house and except in three places, they were private houses.

Well I went from Kempsey by train and train to Bexley and

walked to the house.

A couple of times we’d pass through Sydney. Dad, his family came from Walldale near Cowra, his mother and father owned the wheat farm down there. So when he moved up to the north coast and we’d go down there on holidays, you’d have a pass

and you’d have to pass through Sydney and it wasn’t even spending a night, you’d spend some hours there and then catch a train to the south again.

In applying for a renewal in their license, they had to produce the information

about all their purchases of liquor during the year and it was on that basis that they calculated what the license fee would be. And it was our job to be able to check as we could the entire in these forms as to where they’d purchased all their liquor and to that end the government had insisted that all these people would supply copies of their invoices.

So we had to go through all those and make sure that they balanced out. And that was heads down, tail up for a long while.

Maybe the license to sell liquor, that was the only thing that I was aware of. In general pubs were the only ones who had accommodation

and some of them didn’t have any accommodation at all. So there was a lack of accommodation of people moving around the country and that was overcome by having all these, what do they call them now, the word slipped by.

So the pubs were, they had laws until themselves of course, it seems. That’s when there was some restriction as far as Aborigines were concerned. The demon drink was their undoing, as it is a lot of white people.

I was a bit too young to be able to take notice of that. Just don’t know what those restrictions were.

Well I was a junior clerk getting a hundred and four pounds a year. And I was in the

accounts section and we were dealing with people from the public in areas where people could be interviewed and supplied with information that they required if we could, and that was on a daily basis of a fully routine sort of stuff. But

part of my job was that I had to look after the time book, in those days you signed on and signed off and it was my job to pick up the book, which is out on the front counter, at nine o’clock. And it was also then my job to be fairly easy

on the people that came late. So there would be lots and lots of reasons why I wasn’t there nine o’clock when my favourite girlfriend hadn’t arrived. But still that was interesting, it was quite interesting in the section I was in because the system changed where they had tax stamps and group certificates and tax deducted at the source and this was a system they had to go through,

so they brought in all the other clerks that were in other public departments and we had a mixture of all sorts of different people then. And the machinery was all in the accounts section where there’d be hundreds of people bringing in their certificates where they got their refunds, etcetera, quite an interesting time, changing time.

Well go back to Cougal, when we were in Cougal in 1935, ’34 or ’33,

and there was an aged gentleman who lived in the village and he always got the papers, somehow or other, and he kept telling us about that the Japs, the Japanese, and he was concerned and worried what they were doing. So that sort of sparked off a little bit of thought about things. But no as a kid we didn’t, we weren’t that concerned about things,

but when we got our wireless of course, then we got a bit more information. There was concern about what was going to happen and what did happen, and both my mother and father had brothers who had been in the First World War. My mother had lost a brother and my father’s only

brother came back and so we were aware of that and there was lots of talk about cannon fodder and “Not going to let my son go to war,” etcetera. And so I got there in 1939 and it wasn’t that long before the war started, so it was quite a shock and a change and a lot

of the people from the tax office, they enlisted because you had to get, of course the tax office was a protected industry, and they had to get permission from the chief officer to enlist, so my friend I went to school with Geoff Corman, it was at his house at Dolls Point that I was boarding at one stage,

and we were pretty good mates and we decided that we would join the forces. So we were going to join the navy. That was his selection and I agreed, so we went for our examination and I had to get permission to join the navy and of course I got stumbled because I’m colour-blind, so I wouldn't have been much help to the navy so it was back to work again.

And my mate got called up and he was in the searchlight units then, he finished up in the unit. And I didn’t enlist until 1942, so a couple of years between ’39 and ’42, but it was in 1941 we were told to get into the navy, so there was an interim there where

we were making up our minds.

Well as I recall, only the things that were happening between say the English government and the German government and the Prime Minister was,

I’ve forgotten his name now, and there was all this talk about that. So that it was, you know, we were conscious of it all the time and particularly seeing Mum and Dad had relatives in the army during the First World War. So we were fairly well, we had a fair bit of knowledge about it, so it was in the tax office, you had to, I then had to go through the

process again but there was a lot of talk about enlisting in the tax office and they slowly went off, and there were two or three of us talking about where, how we’d go in and join together , which we did, eventually three of us joined together and we decided that we wanted to be some technical unit, but they eventually

picked on me for going to the armoured corps.

On the front line in France and they were foot soldiers and some of Mum’s brothers,

the brother that she lost, he got killed when he came back to Australia. But front line soldiers, mud and guts and they went through all those big battles in the Somme etcetera and my father’s brother, because he was off a farm he had a whole heap of horses, draught horses, to look after and he used to carry

ammunition up to the front with the carrier, or some sort of a wheeled vehicle. And you had to have someone who was sitting on horses on the front and didn’t have any seat or anything, it was just sitting on the horses and you’d have a couple of people with him and he got bombed so many times that they wouldn't go with him

anymore, because the bombs behind would go off and as far as any intimate recollection of what they told me, I can’t recall what it was, but it was a pretty hairy sort of a game.

Yes he was killed in a railway accident.

Well I suppose the first part of it was the Honolulu when the Japanese struck in Hawaii, that’s when it came home to us.

Not a lot, not so much really. It was something we knew about but of course as soon as the war started that was the topic of conversation everywhere.

I was living in Bexley at this stage and yes it was in September I think wasn’t it.

Concern, but worried, and we knew eventually that we’d all going, eventually join up, or be called up, one or the other. But we wouldn’t have been called up where we were, but it was not a real worry about that until I eventually joined and the reality of it all came much closer. So there was much more thought of what was

happening overseas while we were in the army, not that it worried us a great deal because we spent most of our time in Australia, but that wasn’t our own doing because we were a tank regiment and they wanted us to be a Brisbane Line or some such thing as they had at that stage.

Join the navy and see the world! I suppose it was only pleasant thoughts of seeing the rest of the world and you could see it by navy. The way I looked at it was I couldn't see any way I could get out of Australia because the few boats that were moving around were pretty expensive. We were in a sort of

pendulous situation in those early days and that’s why I eventually went to Japan, because I thought, “Well gee, I’m nearly in Japan, I’ll never get to see Japan. I’ll go now.” I wasn’t sorry about that.

I can remember they had big long

funnels in front of you, going back about twenty feet and at the back of them were all darkened, so I suppose that’s how they kept it so dark inside and they had these lights green and red and I couldn't tell the difference, so I was a goner straight away. They wouldn't accept me and that was the finish of it. That’s the only thing I remember of it. They didn’t say anything to me, but eventually they told me that I wasn’t acceptable

because of my eyesight.

Well first things second. Well the tax office produced money, that’s finance,

so it was necessary to keep that going with income tax etcetera because that’s part of where the income comes from, secondly the two divisions of people who were in the army, ones the conscript and the others are volunteer. And so it meant that anyone who worked in the protected industry would get a call-up

notice and they’d just hand it in to their office and it wouldn't be valid anymore. So that meant that those who didn’t want to go to war, if they were in those industries, that they would stay there. But thankfully not very many of them did that. Most of the Australians would have been volunteers. Does that cover that?

No not really, it didn’t really have any effect on the area I was in or any other areas for that matter.

The ones that all joined up of course were all young blokes. Some of those that stayed behind might have been unmarried or married, had kids. But no there was no problem of thinking that ‘Joe Blow’ was going, or should have gone or didn’t go. It was left to each individual to decide what he wanted to do.

So we tried to get into the navy, Cliff and I and later on three of us joined the army. There was never any distinction there. But there was a general distinction between the volunteer people and what they call the ‘chocos’ [chocolate soldiers, militia]. They were called up and

eventually a lot of those who came up were called up and changed over and volunteered to join the air force and navy etcetera, etcetera.

Well the, not the deputy commissioner, one of the other commissioners, it was in his barrow

and I don’t think he knocked back anyone. So whilst there was the restriction, you know, got to have the numbers there, it didn’t stop anyone from enlisting. You know the man himself made the decision, not the government.

I think they replaced them with women. That was an opening for women to get into the public service and get into areas where they hadn’t been in before. Like I was in the assessing area. When I came back we had lots and lots of people, females working in there. Even

one lovely lady from, not Lord Howe Island, the next one to it, she was working in the tax office and she and all the family came. They evacuated all those from, my memory is not very good, it’s good as far as long distance is

concerned but front on one’s not so good. So that’s what happened, that’s what happened there and when we all came back, back in the tax office, we were there mixed up with women and gradually got to the stage that they were doing all the things that was a male area, like the investigation

areas that I finished up in, that eventually had women doing that.

Well I wasn’t there when it happened, but the people who were working there when I came back, they were doing the same job as men would

do and it was only a matter of training really. I don’t know whether they brought that many skills there but they had the skills in any case to do the job.

Well the tax office, yeah.

Well they were, when they eventually got the women in there, they were accepted, but some of the old fogies would say, “Oh we’re not going to work with sheilas.” You know, that sort of mind you can’t overcome but, no, there wasn’t any problem, there was a problem that was everywhere,

women trying to get a job in the workplace, they were doing jobs they could do that men were doing and of course part of the problem there was that they were on a limited wage too. So there’s your discrimination. So the women should have revolted.

I’m just saying the award rate for women was less than men. But no they were getting the same as we were because things had changed.

A lot of the girls went in the army, quite a lot of them. So I don’t know whether there was any distinction between the army women and those that weren’t in the army,

I don’t think so.

No, no didn’t have a clue what, who made the decisions.

No I wasn’t.

Well just a sense of disappointment, particularly when you build yourself up to certain states to do things and suddenly you stop. A bit bewildered, but anyway we had the

other option which I took. So I joined the army.

No.

They didn’t tell me anything.

I just got a note from them telling me I hadn’t been accepted.

That didn’t come about. See people who enlisted would have enlisted on their own volition and as much as you try to say, “You should join up. Here’s a white feather,” or whatever, that doesn’t work at all.

So all the people who wanted to join the army, they joined it, or the air force. I don’t think that the navy for instance would be considering allocating time to advising people to join the army. Two separate bodies.

2nd of June 1942. So I joined the tax office in ’39, so from September ’39 until June ’42. It was in that time that people were talking about joining, “Will we join? Won’t we join?” and of course young people like myself we all made up our mind eventually.

Papers day by day. Radio. Keeping record of it and I can remember there were lots of letters

came back to the tax office from fellows who had enlisted and were in the desert in Africa.

Just where they were, and of course the battles hadn’t been entered into with Rommel then, where they were stationed in Egypt or in other areas.

I didn’t get any but those people who wrote, we had a central allocated, someone allocated the time of one officer to handle all the mail that came from overseas so that they could pass it around to all the rest of the people, and that itself was enlistment enticement.

Because of all the information about all those people who were over there and what they were doing etcetera, etcetera, it’s like “Join the navy and see the world”.

Nothing at all.

Didn’t worry me at all, the only concern I had was that I had missed out on getting into the navy and so it was only a matter of time for us to make up our mind what we were going to do next. So that was in the following year. I’ve got the copy of the application form from the navy and it was in

1941. That was after Pearl Harbor.

Just a radio, I think.

Japan entered into the war later on didn’t they, after Pearl Harbor. Or just before….

Well everyone realised that they had to join up and I can’t remember what activated my decision to join the army, I think it

was just flow on from wanting to join the navy.

Yes, he was in the air force and he enlisted on the 23rd of July 1940, I think it was. That was my birthday. And he’d probably be someone it would be an advantage to

you to see, because he was so involved and backwards and forwards in the desert and the stories that they tell of the things that happened to them, apart from the war, etcetera. He was lucky he went through all of that, on the ground of course. But he had been in the militia before the war and then

when he enlisted, he enlisted in the air force.

He was overseas.

Well only by mail to our mother. He

was a good writer, he wrote long letters and I got into trouble for only writing half a page. But I’ve got all the letters I wrote to my mother. She kept them and I’ve got them.

Of course you understand there was censorship of all the mail,

so it was just day to day things. So he couldn’t tell you where he was, except that we knew he was in the desert and just items about what was happening, what they were doing, how they had a dog that they looked after and the dog was a saviour, because they were well behind the lines, well not that far behind

them, the enemy lines and the aeroplane just came over and this dog could hear them two or three or four minutes before they heard them. So he was their saviour. So that’s an amazing part of one of the war stories.

Yes he has got a name.

It’s an Arab word meaning nothing. It was a name that they gave him that meant nothing.

Mum worried a lot. She worried about, always worrying where he was, looking at maps trying to work out where he was. The maps that she looked up

she was well, well, far, far away from where he was. But she was a worrier. And I think women would probably worry more than men in general terms. You’ve got to have a pretty hard surface to be able to not worry about a lot of those things in wartime.

Not very often. For one reason, when I was living in Sydney, as I’ve mentioned before, I was getting one hundred and four pound a year and most of that went on boarding, travelling and the occasional updating of a suit.

We went to the showgrounds in Sydney, that’s the old showground and there was an officer, and we were going through the initial tests and issue of clothing and things, and there was one area there where there were a couple of officers who were selecting people to go into the armour regiment and as we went through that, we had a talk to them, and they captured the three of us

altogether, so we stayed there the night, slept in the pig pens, on the palliasses; palliasses were big hessian bags filled with straw, so back to basics again. And from then we went up to Tamworth where we did a lot of training, marching mostly, or doing odd jobs.

So many people there. It was all pretty well organised really, just as if you were in a giant circus, only controlled. So it was nothing that was unexpected.

Well I think, once you had enlisted in the first place, there was then an allocation of where you would go. I can’t remember what

we call anything of great interest that I can remember.

Somewhere along the line there must have been. And of course, but they didn’t give me an eye test. There was no problem with my eyes, they said, but of course there is. But

no they have you normal sorts of medicals, I think the doctor checked you, tested etcetera. Not a very basic, it was a very basic acceptance medically. Sign a few papers here and there and suddenly you’ve got a palliasse and you’ve got to find a place to sleep.

Only a uniform there and it was winter of course, June, and fairly heavy clothing and boots, and a hat and that was it. And ready to go.

Yes but I don’t know when they gave us those metal tags. I can’t recall that important time.

They wanted to know if I was interested in joining the armoured corps and I said, “Yes.” And I didn’t understand

what they were looking for really. But when I got to the 2/9th Armoured Regiment, everyone else was about six inches shorter than me so they got shorter people. I don’t know, I was only about eleven stone when I enlisted, and about six foot one and a half. Whatever reason I don’t know.

Riding around in tanks, which eventuated.

They were…both had come out of an office the same as I had, but both of them when they joined the army they went into

doing the office work, and I didn’t join the army to do office work so that might be why I joined the 2/9th Armoured Regiment. It was there and we were asked to go and that was it.

No, this was a

separate induction area where everyone went through. The showgrounds was a movement area; people moved through the showground coming in and out of Sydney, staying overnight, what-have-you.

Well the next morning, or some mornings later, we got shunted onto a train and landed in

Tamworth to start our training, which was mostly marching. Learning how to keep in step.

Yes, they had long buildings, totally narrow, wooden structure on the side of a hill and

there must have been twenty to thirty of these which could hold twenty or thirty or forty men. And there was no furniture, just palliasses on the floor.

I can’t remember. It wasn’t any great interest.

Didn’t do any at all. We were doing marching mainly. See these are people who have just walked in off the street and they were trying to teach them how to march and give them drills etcetera and marching, get them in a bit of nick. So that went on and on and the only difference from that would be some of the people got caught, one of the famous calls of the

sergeant major is, “Anyone got any musical expertise?” And if anyone put their hand up, you’d be given the job of carting a piano from one place to the other, so when you’re in the army you don’t volunteer for too many things.

No, he had a loud voice, he was a

sergeant. And he was obviously a bit older than us and he knew what he wanted and we did what he wanted.

There wasn’t very much discipline in it at all at the showground to our

knowledge, but as soon as we got on the parade ground at Tamworth, we knew who the boss was: the fellow with the loud voice and the three stripes. That’s where the first part of discipline came in, and it’s a discipline in the army slowly grows on you, if you make any mistakes well you don’t do it again.

But generally that works pretty well. There were never very many things that needed discipline, particularly at Tamworth. Some of them might drink too much, but that seems to be the trait of things in the army, that’s what works is discipline and

it’s drummed into you to start with, “Put me to bed, sergeant major,” [Kiss me goodnight, sergeant-major, popular song of World War II] doesn’t apply in this, in practical terms.

Well continually marching, left, right, left, right, left, right and making sure that people did the right thing. If they forgot the piece of paper, they put them on an emu parade, and the emu parade is going around picking up the papers. Eventually

you learn all those things, you don’t do that, you don’t do other things. So other people get into trouble for doing things that innocently they may have done, but you learn not to do.

It wasn’t a thing that we were concerned about, and all that we expected and knew would happen

would be the sergeant major would be running you around the hills all, wherever you were, getting you into lick. And in some cases that job was taken over by officers. I can remember one major in particular, he used to take us all marching or running in the middle of the night all around Singleton and he had us as fit as bloody bulls.

And that’s what sergeant majors do: keep them fit. Keep them fit and teach them discipline.

No resistance. You couldn’t volunteer out of it. You just had to take part like everyone else did and you had volunteered to do this so,

you know, you got yourself in the position where you can’t back out, and those that wanted to back out would learn the hard way.

Well some of them break the rules and it costs them money. That’s just part of the army routine as well. If you

do something which you shouldn’t have done then you’re paraded before the officer or whatever and he can either put you on an onerous duty somewhere or no leave, all sorts of things like that. And you are disciplined not to do those things.

There were fines for various offences, yes.

Five dollars, five shillings a day, and my first pay as I mentioned before was greater than any pay I’d had at the tax office. So generally I was in front.

Food.

If you have meals in town, go and have a steak and eggs. Canteen. That was the interesting thing at Tamworth that when I got there I was told, “You get your palliasse and you sleep there.” And there was a fellow alongside me and I thought he looked like an American. Why I thought that I don’t know and his name was Jimmy Maine and he was with me and we were together

for the rest of the war, so we’re old ‘camaraderies’. And he liked a drink or two and I wasn’t a drinker. So I said, “No thanks.” I said, “I don’t drink.” I said, “I’ve been down there listening to all their rowdy songs,” and they do have so many songs that soldiers sing that are not for the ears of these young ladies. And

so I resisted this for a fair while and then suddenly I was down there smoking and drinking and singing songs. So that was part of the discipline in a different sort of way.

I can but yes

there were lots of ditties, they were all pretty rude. I can’t remember them.

Six days a week. I think the canteen was open seven days a week and the wet canteen that is. They had a dry canteen as well, we (UNCLEAR). Lollies

and things like that. It was only in Japan that they had the canteen open six days and not open on Sunday and you were expected to go to church.

Well have a feed at the local restaurant, have a few beers at the pub. That’s all they’ve accounted for.

But there’s not much time to do anything in one day. You’ve got to get there in one day and you’ve got to come back again so you don’t get much of a chance to do anything.

He was a bank teller in the Commercial Bank of Sydney. And he lived in Newcastle somewhere.

And we met at Tamworth and he was a real good bloke. Still is a good bloke. And we went everywhere together on leave, particularly when we got down to Southport, we found out where the pub was. But of course, basically when you are in the army,

what do you do when you go on leave? You can jump on a train and go for a ride somewhere or you can go and have a swim, or you can stay in town and have a feed and go and have a few grogs at the pub if you can find one open, then back to camp again.

You’d go to a place where they had dancing,

that’s where you’d meet them. That would be the only outlet I’d say.

Didn’t go, I wasn’t much of a dancer.

Pretty good. ‘The army cooks with funny looks’, that’s another one of the stories. Yes they were

generally pretty good. The food was wholesome and that’s how I got my nickname. Lady on the phone asked me, “Did you have any nicknames?” And I said, “Yes I did.” And she said, “What were they?” And they called me ‘Hungry’ and there was a reason for that one. We were at Singleton in the middle of summer and we were running like mad and

as fit as bloody bulls and on this day we had beef stew. I think it was something to do with beef and it must have been fairly tasty because I had two helpings of it and I thought, “Well there’s some more left, I’ll have some more,” and they all said, “You hungry bastard.” So out of that came ‘Hungry’.

So I became known as ‘Hungry’, or ‘Hun’, and eventually that developed into “Oh Hi.” And that was our signal call, you’d develop a rapport with certain people and you can talk to them with your own certain language.

A month or six weeks.

Went to Hume Camp in Albury, near the Hume Weir on the Murray River, and we did more running and training and marching. Talking about sergeant majors, it was about seven miles into Albury and so he

used to march us all around the hills everywhere and on a certain date he marched us in towards Albury itself and we knew there was a pub on the way, we thought, “I wonder, I wonder”, and he marched us to the front of this pub and called us to attention and he had a look around and he said, “Fall out, be back in five minutes.” And guess where we went. So he was a good sergeant major.

Well it was through the streets and with Albury it’s a fairly big place so there was no comment to any degree or no concern in reality.

Well there was certainly a lot of money going into the town particularly the restaurants. I remember a couple of restaurants in Albury that were very popular and I can recall in one particular, we’re talking about value into the town, distracted

thinking of something else that happened in that town. Yes I would think that that would put thousands and thousands of pounds into the area because apart from that, there was another big camping area, another big army area, Puckapunyal. Puckapunyal, I think that was what it was, on the other side of the river in Victoria. And they had many more people than we

had in camp, because there was only one battalion, one regiment at Hume Camp and they had heaps of them beside the river, so they all went into Albury. And I had some girlfriends in there so I would often go and see them; meet up with them again.

I think it was because they were looking for training areas. Obviously for some reason they wanted these camps, they had to canvas for some other reason, some other matter and we went there, Hume Camp in Albury and a lot of us were under tents there. In fact the whole tent type of living.

But that was an interesting place and we swum across…

I don’t think there is

a great deal of change in what people did except of course that there are lots of people around in uniforms, lot of soldiers around, and of course we had the Americans who landed on our shores after 1941 episode and no I was moving around

amongst everyone, I played football as well as cricket and so it didn’t change our style of living, doing the work we did. It would have affected mainly the people from whom one son or two sons had left. Certainly it up-ended their lives to a great degree.

No it wasn’t a real worrying time, we were so far away from everything, it was pretty hard to put yourself in this and feel the same way as the people who were overseas. So yes I used to play cricket and played football and there wasn’t

any great change to any extent, except of course the things started to be in short supply because the army wanted it all and that effected people more than anything I think.

Food. Lots of people complained that they couldn’t get baked beans and I said, “I’ll give

you back all the baked beans I can”. And just food and things like that. So the shortage of things probably hadn’t really been felt to any great extent during that particular time but once the whole of the world seemed to be encompassed in war that was

more concern on the family basis.

Yes I suppose, I can’t say that I noticed a change. But

by reason of the fact that suddenly we were inundated with all those people, American soldiers, etcetera, and the same number in New Zealand, and that would have had more effect on anyone because of the money they produced. And so the greatest effect was that the Americans had arrived and with their money

they put up the prices of everything so there was a lot of, a slight amount if dissent as far as the Americans were concerned. But that wasn’t a real worry. No I couldn't put my finger on any real concerns that would have affected everyday life.

Just that they were well dressed and had good uniforms and we didn’t. Even in the army, we didn’t get mixed up with them until a later stage because of their long stay in Australia. But oh no I think they were accepted and

of course they won all the hearts. So that was a strange phenomenon I thought, but however that’s just my thoughts of it.

Well it didn’t worry me. Didn’t worry me a lot. It was something that wasn’t of great concern to me, didn’t effect me in any way, because I didn’t have any girl that they wanted to pinch. So it was a nothing as far as I was concerned.

Not necessarily, it was spoken about more by men talking to each other and giving their opinions about things, it was something that was there and couldn't do anything about it. Just the way things, the dice tumbles.

I think it came later as far as I was concerned. No I don’t recall having dug any air-raid pits or air-raid shelters,

I know my wife’s parents did of course. I don’t know exactly when they did it but everyone was digging holes everywhere but I might have been boarding at a house but I wasn’t responsible for those sort of things and it wasn’t that long after Pearl Harbor that I enlisted in any case. It was

after that that people started to get worried when the Japs started coming down through the Indies.

Whether I would get my mother’s consent; that was one of the things. And no I think it was probably a failing by some of them; they wanted to go into selected areas, so it might have taken them a long time to make up their mind, one of the problems was with us, he said he had knowledge of a survey unit

that he thought we should go into, so we had ideas of going into a survey unit and then we got to the showgrounds and we were drafted into the armoured corps regiment. So there was a certain amount of time in between, but in that time of course I’d tried to get into the navy and there was more fluctuation in time until I enlisted.

The (UNCLEAR) of time and something that was going to happen, it was only a matter of deciding when, that’s all it was. So we sort of got a group together and we were talking about joining the army for a long while, and eventually we did.

No well it was after Pearl Harbor, because Pearl Harbor was ’41 and enlisted in ’42, so that would have been a jog along. Probably think about that as one of the points that I’d made up my mind, it was only a matter of getting organised

in deciding.

It was wintertime so would have only been two or three months but it might have been a bit longer but it was into the summer and then we went to Singleton,

so it must have been four or five months.

Very chilly. Very cold indeed and of course there were a limited number of blankets, and I’ve got a bleaker story I can tell you about Japan though. No, it was really cold. But of course we were doing a lot of running around and training

and that, we were in good nick and having plenty to eat, so that kept us going. That was one of the things you had to get used to. You couldn't do anything about the cold.

It was like going into another world. I was an innocent young soldier and

I’d lived in the country for a long while and I’d only spent a couple of years in Sydney and I handled the going in Sydney, so I thought I could handle this army business all right. But it was different, so different. It was into a different group of people and in a group of people where they let all their inhibitions flow out.

They were all Aussies and eventually I became the same. And it’s, by being together for so long, and working together and trusting each other, eventually when the time came and we had to land on Borneo, I often thought, “Now I wonder if anyone is worried about what is going to happen?”

That’s one thing that didn’t worry me at all and I often thought about, “Why wasn’t I worried?” and I thought, “Got mates all around you”; that’ my theory about that sort of business.

Well I had a bed and a place to sleep

permanent and no worries about where I was going to sleep next week. Because boarding houses are not very resistant, they’re a bit resistant to people.

No, no it was just, suddenly it happened.

We went to Singleton, it must have been in the summer of ’40, ’42. Because I know it was in the middle of summer and that’s where I got my nickname. But that’s where we started with tanks; we had some positive things to do then. And apart from the major that would take us running all night in the dark,

we had Grant tanks and Lee tanks, American tanks, great big ones, about twenty eight tons or something and we did a lot of gunnery work in, with red guns, pulling them to pieces and taking them to pieces, machine guns and they were the American ones,

I’ve forgotten the name of them, machine guns and we had seventy-five millimetre guns in the tanks, plus machine guns. So we had to learn about all those, keep them clean and tidy. So that kept us going all the time we were in Singleton.

Well you’ve got a driver in the front and in the Lee tank you’ve got a second gunner who put the shells into the barrel and we had the crew commander who was standing in the…

underneath the round entrance to the tank, climbed in from the top. He would get down and he would be sitting in the firing situation and alongside him he had a wireless operator with a 119 radio, wireless.

Well we weren’t allotted to any tank at that stage so we did a little bit of everything,

except driving. The driver was the one who controlled things and we just did quite a lot of travelling around in these tanks and most of my time was being in with the radio operator.

Yes well we had a group of

pegs that all had radios in them and this was the name of any group anywhere and you know the frequency you’re supposed to be on at a certain time and you’d have a leading tank who would control things then he would net in, this is an expression of meshing-in tanks on the same frequency so that they would get on, when

they turned their radio on, they turned it on to the right frequency, and the captain or the leader would call them in and they’d call them in using the normal call sign and would net them in so that they could hear them – it was just like tuning a TV [television] set – and eventually get the whole lot of them together.

And that was the lines of communication everywhere. So that when that we went out on these treks around the countryside, there was always a program of doing this and we weren’t allowed to use the radio in any shape or form unless it was on that set, on that frequency and not supposed to be talking to each

other unless it was organised. And I was working away on our tank one day, trundling along somewhere and I had my headphones on my head, “Oh Hun.” which was my nickname coming from one of these other people, saying hello to me, but if they had found out who he was or what it was, there would have been hell concerned because they said, you know, at the end we might be on our frequency.

But however, one of the things that made the army interesting.

Only exactly where we were and just talk about, answer the instructions from our leader and you don’t do any talking to each other except through the captain,

or whoever the leader was.

Pretty hairy, it depends on who’s driving. The big tanks, Lees and Grants, they are just a big trundling job and you are either sitting down or standing up and unless they

run full belt into a tree or something, it wasn’t that dangerous, there wasn’t much of a complaint about it. The only problem we might have, eventually we had Matilda tanks and there was less room in those and they had sort of automatic gearbox or semi-automatic gearbox, all you had to do was press a button and you were into first, second or third, or from third,

fourth or fifth gear down to neutral and of course one day they said, “You have to have some training in driving.” So I got in and I was driving this Matilda tank on the road up in Queensland somewhere and they said, “Change down,” and I changed down from five to one and it went ‘bang!’ The fellow sitting in the back and of course they all got thrown off and I didn’t get asked to drive any more.

I think they would have all been through a training course, a driving course, for driving. Because when I joined the army I’d never driven a car even, so putting us in charge of a tank, that was fair risk, and a lot of

training ahead, so if you got the job as driver, well you’d be driving it everywhere and so gain the experience.

Extremely hot. It was, you were sitting in sweat all the time it was fair to say, really hot in the summer time. But you can’t do much about that, it wasn’t a real problem, it was fairly hot.

Well training in all various forms. Firstly you had to be, there were grease points on the tracks and there has to be a greaser. And guess who got that job? I was the best greaser on our team, in our group, because

there was only one. That was me. And they were very difficult to do it because, if you’ve got a visualisation of what a track looks like, it’s a running track that runs and the wheels in the middle are turning and these tracks are sitting all the way around and they’re locked in and they’re just thump, thump, thump,

thump, thump and that’s what it is.

They’re stationary but the nipple was inside that area, but I’ve got two thumbs, two nails off my fingers that got caught when I was greasing. They had a lift-up flap and sort of

a bed holding it there and you pushed on that, and if you bumped it, it happened to me twice. But that sort of one of the things you do and sometimes they’ve got to take the tracks off for some reason so you’ve got to learn how to take the tracks off and put them back on again; that was an onerous sort of a job. And clean the guns, that was one of the

daily sort of a job, that was, took a fair while and put a bit of muscle power into that and, apart from that, once you were in the tank, there was indirect firing that they have. We had at Singleton, part of our job was to practice firing at a tank in front of us, it was a big shed type thing

which was on a track and the track was circular, but it wasn’t circular in that it was round on the bottom and veered away from it, if you had a square in which they set this, they go outside the square so when you’re firing at it, you see it going long but you don’t see it going that way. That was one of the tricks of how to work

out the speed of the tank itself. When we were in the States and they’ve got a mechanised thing that makes it, forces it around, you’ve got to work out from that how to aim off and shoot it, and it’s pretty difficult. If you can imagine like someone shooting a duck that’s flying, you’ve got to

aim on him and work out how fast he’s going, it’s the same principle, but the different principle in this was that the target was going away from you or coming towards you and of course very few people hit the target. But there was additional indirect firing and this was at Caloundra. We shifted from Glasshouse Mountains for a week I think up to Caloundra and we had to

build a box that would fit men into it and it was to be the point that they were going to shoot at. And that had to be over the hill and down the barrel somewhere. So we, Jimmy Maine and I had the job of going down to help digging this,

making this box-like affair and it was right beside the sand dunes and being a fisherman, I always carried my fishing line so we got down there and I said to Jim, “I’m sure there’ll be a bream over there.” So we climbed over the sand hills and found some pipis [shellfish], and we caught about two or three big bream and suddenly along came a jeep with our officer

on it and he was one of the headquarter officers and he said, “You soldiers will have to get moving off this beach because there’s going to be indirect firing here.” “Yes sir, yes sir, we will!” And so back to the tank and he was the fellow who was to tell me what to do. But the idea of indirect firing and a tank because a tank can only, you can’t move it up and down, but you can move the

barrel up and down and by using a few sticks out in front to make a line, but those parallels would join at infinity. The further it gets away from you the closer it gets, so we would use that to fire up in the air to get to

that, it proved to be a workable plan. So we spent a lot of time doing that. Not that we ever got to use it when we got to Borneo, we just (UNCLEAR).

Yes, that was Singleton; we hadn’t thought of it, none of our brigade had gone overseas at this stage,

but we knew that, I think there might have been some people, the 2/6th Armoured Regiment had gone to New Guinea and what happened is that they got bogged most of the time, so we realised if we were going to be in tanks we could be in a situation where we might be in the wrong spot and we’d get bogged. And it did happen to some of the tanks in New Guinea earlier on and they’ve got an

escape hatch underneath and this is one of the first things they taught me when we were looking at these Lees and other tanks in Singleton, how to take it off and put it back again. And they did that and they got down, they dragged the mud away and got out. So we knew what could happen. We didn’t realise what was happening to the tanks in the Middle East because they were just getting

blown up completely for different sort of guns that were against them; that 88mm gun that the Germans had, it was a real disaster. And so we knew what could happen but eventually when we got there, it didn’t happen.

We must have been there for at least four or five months because our next plan was to Puckapunyal, which was in Victoria, and that was in the middle of winter down there, or round about that time.

Mostly in tanks running over hills and indirect firing, not indirect firing, firing at

targets and doing a bit of, the gunners in particular would go on these gunnery shoots. But we were really waiting there to go somewhere and so I suppose we were there from four to five months. Probably not the longest trip we had because then we went up to Bribie Island.

We were all keen to go. Everyone was keyed up ready to go. Some of them not keen to go went on sick leave, took long leave. Some of them were obviously who, avoiding is a hard word to say, but some of them certainly

took some action that was a little bit doubtful. But there were plenty of those.

Not anything at all except the grapevine covers all that, you hear stories about people and

because you think it could have happened, you think “Oh well it may be factual and it may not”.

They’d conveniently go on sick parade, or get sick or something happens. But there weren’t too many of those.

I don’t think they react at all, they just forget about it. They know who it is, what they might be doing. It wasn’t a problem. I think the problem was with the few odd-bods.

No we were all doing the same training. Machine guns and we did a lot of training on machine guns with live ammunition in these huts. I was staggered, they had the live ammunition there and if someone made a mistake there could be a problem, and one of the cooks

got killed. Someone did the wrong thing one day and the live ammunition into play and a spurt went through the galvanised iron into the next one, which was the cookhouse, and he copped it. So it’s amazing what can happen when you’re not careful. We probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

Well you’ve either got a long ramrod, which has cloths type of thing that you can push into the barrel, push it backwards and forwards and that cleans the barrel of the gun,

proves that there’s no obstacle in between. And you have a cap that you can put over the front of the 75mm, keeps the rain and the rats out and so that’s about all you have to do.

Well, the longer you are together the more cohesive it is. You get to know people and you know the people that you mightn’t agree with, certain things, but you learn to live with people, so that was never, very seldom there was any argument amongst people.

On a couple of occasions there were a couple of fisticuffs but that was something that happened that no one knew the answer to, so no one really worried about it. I think it was the camaraderie that developed between people and the whole section that we were in. We were all friendly with each other.

There was some animosity between some of the older fellows who had been in the regiment before we got there, but they ironed out all their problems and some of those flared up on odd occasions, and one fellow was a bit antagonistic to one of the little blokes in our squadron

and some of us who didn’t like the way things had happened said, “Oh well, we’ll catch up with him one of these days.” Well when we got to Southport we had to learn to swim, learn to get your bronze medallion, and this fellow who was a fairly hefty fellow, we used to put, Jim Maine and I were old surfers from way back, and the sea was pretty rough at

Southport and of course we knew the rough bits to avoid, the usual thing was, “All on.” And if anyone said that, you got off. In any case, this bloke was amongst the group and I said to Jim, “We’ll catch him on the next wave, you sing out,” and so “Righto!” There was this huge dumper coming and we said, “All on.” and he jumped on it and we

back-pedalled and he really got tumbled around in the waves, so we said, “Well we’re square with him.” So there’s always a way to get square, it might have been a rough way to do it, but it was the easy way. So there was no problem anymore.

We went straight to Toorbul Point, which is near Caboolture,

which is seventy or eighty miles directly north of Brisbane. At a place right opposite Bribie Island, you know the area? So that’s where we went to and we were tangled up with the Americans there and we didn’t meet a lot of them but some of the Americans were invited over to the canteen when it opened up in the afternoon or some of the Australians went across and

met with them, so it was all comrades together and so we were doing this landing ship tank business and apart from catching fish and we didn’t do anything else but that.

They had landing ship tanks or a lesser one of those with a open down front and they came to the beach where we were, on the estuary and we climbed aboard and go across to Bribie Island, land there, the same way and come back again and we didn’t lose a tank anywhere. So it was getting used to doing that. And we did that

until they decided to put us out at Glasshouse Mountains, which is in the same area, and we were on the top of the inland section of Bribie Island, we were ten or twenty miles up from where we were at Caboolture, at…I’ve forgotten the name again.

From Toorbul Point up to where we were at Glasshouse Mountains, it was only off-set about thirty, the sea there, and we were sort of sitting up there and we were getting our tanks ready to go to New Guinea and we spent a lot of time helping the

other group, the other tank, I think it was 2nd Tank Battalion, smaller tanks and we helped them in getting all their gear together and we were disappointed in that we weren’t going. We were prepared to go but they chose not to take us and they took the smaller tanks. So what happened there was they suddenly sent all the South Australians and Victorians home on leave, so then the New South Wales fellas were left

there in co-charge of the camp, and so we did and that’s where we did all our blowing up of fish. So we had plenty of fish to eat.

Detonators, gelignite, and we had a unit of engineers with us and they had all this gelignite and they had the detonators as well.

We went to Toorbul Point, Bribie Island.

Landing ship tank training, landing onto big barges, called landing ship tanks,

with the front end opening down. Putting the tanks on board and moving across to Bribie Island and then spending the night there and coming back to Toorbul Point, training on and off landing ship tanks on beaches.

Yes, it looks like a large barge which has got no superstructure except the captain and what have you and it’s got this long body which goes out in front of it and it’s probably twenty foot down, deep and it’s made to carry tanks

and the front of it is a doorway. And that’s closed off when everyone is on there and then when they come to the beach, it hits the beach and drops the front door and you drive over it, onto the beach. Conversely you use it coming back.

Well it’s not difficult because the doorway

goes down on the beach and then the tank goes onto it. Not a matter of trying to juggle things. The boat comes onto the shore or lands, puts the door down onto the sand and the tank drives down over it, into the hold sort of business. It’s like a big open hold.

I wouldn't know. Half a dozen.

Well we were told only at the last moment what we were going to do when we got to Borneo and we went onto what is known as

Muara Island. That’s a little island just inside Brunei Bay. And that was where I had a cup of tea five minutes after we got there, because there was a troop of Japanese on the island, but after all the firing and bombing started they left and went back to the mainland.

No, not really. Things were fairly tight as far as information was concerned and most of the officers knew what was happening but they didn’t tell anyone else and that’s probably a good way to prevent any leaking.

Well we had done all our jungle training when we were down in Southport in the hinterland of Queensland, so that we didn’t have any jungle training up there, because it was mostly, on the Atherton tablelands it’s pretty high up and it’s say a

pretty well cleared and farmed area.

Yes they took us to Canungra, which is on the hinterland, and when we first got there all we did was to walk and we got up on the first day and we had all the gear with us

and we walked with our packs on our back and we headed for, I’m trying to think of the name of the retreat that they had up there, in any case we went up into part of the McPherson Range I think or part of the Great Dividing Range, up and onto the top of that area and then

all this arrangement was done on half or third rations, that was part of it and we got to the top of the mountain and then went further along the mountain and then walked down in the middle of the night and camped in Nick’s Valley and then came back to Canungra. So that was all the jungle training that was there except that they, a couple of days they had a track

along the creek at Canungra and they set targets along this track and they suddenly brought them out and took them back and we were supposed to pick up and have a machine gun or whatever we had, or whatever it was, and so point at that and was training to instantly react to something like that. It didn’t serve any purpose

because we didn’t go through any of that.

Not really in the jungle, of course if we thought it was going to be like it was in the jungle in Queensland well we wouldn't have used tanks. The

tanks came onto the land in this case and able to handle that all right because they didn’t get away from it, and there were a couple of bridges that they had to fix up before we got into Brunei township and then we were out on the airport keeping (UNCLEAR) on that and then we got sent to Miri, which is down the coast and

when we got there and we got, we were landed on the eastern coast of the river, we jut sort of moved within the township and we had a tank on the main road, which was on the bottom of a ridge that came along, and we were sort of, functioned to keep the enemy at bay if necessary, but

that was a main road. Then there was an occasion where we had to go on top of a hill further down where the 13th Battalion was and we were stymied in that we had a couple of creeks to cross and fortunately our officer was a bit with it and he got amongst the Chinese, the people there, and he was able to buy a couple of these long logs, which were probably about twenty or thirty foot long and two foot square, and they were

used to push onto the trail bridge and the tanks then went across the top of it. If we hadn’t had that well we wouldn't have been able to get through at all and we would have been bogged trying to get there. So in reality tanks are not for countries like that. And the enemy doesn’t find itself on a bitumen road. Put it that way.

Well there were a lot of older soldiers who were doing the training at Canungra and I don’t know where they got their training from, probably lot of old bushmen who lived up in the country, or in Queensland, where it was similar sort of territory

to what you’d find in the islands in Borneo, so yes I don’t know where they got their training from. It may have well been that they were ex New Guinea people and in most cases I think that would have been it.

Well we never ever

thought where we would be in the position where we’d be told by the Japanese what to do. And that was it.

Yes we were but they were on the run.

Well it’s a pretty big place Canungra as far as territory is concerned. It may well be that the training camp there for jungle warfare was limited in numbers, so we didn’t see any other battalions, units, up there. So they would have, it was only a week or a fortnight at Canungra. It wasn’t very long.

Well that’s about it. They did a bit of…there were a lot of people who couldn't swim and they did a bit of climbing across on ropes

from one side of the creek to the other and they picked a spot where it was fairly wide and it was deep, and they had two ropes as you’ll see in some of those constructions you’ll see these days around some of those holiday areas. And we were asked to grab hold of that rope and slide along it and get to the other end and get down and some of them there couldn't swim. And of course the ultimate was

with those ropes, if you fell, you fell into the water. And then they had a surf brigade alongside to pull them out and some of those fellows that couldn't swim, they knew that they couldn’t swim but they were game for it and they filled it in. But I had a bit of a problem because there was no one organised the way we got onto the rope and the rope was this fixed distance between

things that you were standing on, and I didn’t realise that the fellow in front of me was so high [indicates short] and I’m six foot so and it still didn’t click until we got up and they said, “Well slide across,” and this older fella who was shorter than me, he went across and he was holding on, and somebody said to me “Go on, get started.” And of course he was inching across like that and I was sliding and so within three movements,

he was standing on his toes with his hands on the ropes, and they said, “Go back, go back!” And what happened was he went back and straight into the water! That was one of the unfortunate things, that was a good lesson to anyone crossing over on ropes like that, but that was about all that happened there.

Well we left Australia from Cairns, in May I think it was in ’45. And we came from the Atherton Tablelands so we knew the day before we were going. But naturally a lot of it seeped through because with tanks there was a lot of work to be done to get the tanks down

to be loaded on the ship, so there was notice of advance parties etcetera. I dare say all the fellows in the unit would have known where we were going, that we were going in any case.

Well Cairns is down on the coast and Atherton is on the tablelands. And it happened on both occasions, what do they call them? Tank carriers. Semi-carrier,

semi-loader? With a great big track on it and that, just like you see with bulldozers on them around the place. They were at Cairns when they took them off the train and they pulled them up on top of those and tied down and they carried them up to Wondecla and conversely back down to Cairns again. And somehow

or other they got the tanks into the boats. It wasn’t an LST that we left Cairns in.

We were on an American Victory ship.

I’ve forgotten the name of it now but it was a troop carrying sort of arrangement, or it was a bit of both, those sort of things, the Victory ships are the ones that went backwards and forwards to America, to the European area and they had minimal sort of accommodation,

but sort of bunks all over the place and we landed, I was on the advance party to get on board and we left in the afternoon and there were two tugs pulling the boat out from the harbour, from the wharf and as it got out to the middle of the waterway , the boat took off, or turned around

and took off and hadn’t unhooked the, those little boats, the tugs that pull the boats around and it got pulled underneath the water and one fellow got killed. So it was not a very auspicious occasion. But that was just what happened

and we took off that night and got out into the Coral Sea and we struck a mini typhoon, and everyone got seasick as I recall that. So that was getting onto the boat and we took off for Morotai and got there three or four days later, had a submarine scare; that scared everyone.

You take any ship and it looked like that. It wasn’t anything special. Looked like a cargo boat if you can describe that as a type of boat.

Well you know,

everyone got sick, or most people got sick and you couldn't get down to the toilets because the floor was awash, so it wasn’t very pleasant for, because you couldn't hold your tucker.

Only until the next day. We sort of went through it I think.

Sat down and had a sleep, but there was always a game of two-up on the decks and the captain on the boat was always referring to these people with the galloping dominos, and they were the dice that they were using. And of course the Australians are a bit of a gambler so

someone started the game and there was a lot of money in it as well.

No it was too easy, you’d lose your money.

No.

It was good, the food was good, couldn't complain about that. Always looked after pretty well with food,

I made sure of that.

That’s my nickname, Hungry. You’ve got to have someone to fossick out where the food is. Tell you a few stories of food in Japan.

It was a little atoll. Looked like this, just a few trees,

and as we got close, a coral reef around it and pretty dry, arid sort of an area. There was an aerodrome on it; I think it was the construction corps of the Americans that constructed that aerodrome. It was nothing really. In the tropics everything seems to be beautiful but the only thing that is beautiful is the sunset.

Well it was just an ordinary old island, nothing to enamour us to it at all, and I found that being in tropical areas, there is not a lot of attraction to it, particularly those small atolls. And of course we were situated in a war situation.

Might be different today, they might have a nice canteen where you can look over the water.

Every one, whatever it was, typhoid, we took Atebrin for malaria and every sort of needle that was necessary we took, that was the

army issue, you couldn't avoid that and everyone got the shots for everything that was needed.

There wasn’t very much talk

about the ultimate test when we were going to land on Borneo. Everyone seemed to be cool, calm and collected and there’s got to be a reason for that somehow or other. You would think everyone would be saying, “I’m scared stiff,” but I didn’t hear anyone say that and I asked questions of a lot of people and they said, “No we’re not worried about that.” And no one seemed to be worried about it.

“How do you feel about being shot at when you’re climbing over onto the shore?” And no one seemed to worry about that at all, plus the fact that we could be bombed. If they had any aeroplanes and they did have a few aeroplanes that flew over occasionally. But not really, there wasn’t that much to really worry about there.

I can’t explain it explicitly but for all the people I spoke to, it was an expedition.

Well it wasn’t happening so we didn’t have to worry about it. That’s one good thing about it; you live from day to day.

Yeah well there wasn’t any dock, there was quite a substantial harbour and it was very deep apparently because there were lots of American boats in there and I suppose the boats were there either heading up to the Philippines or coming down from them and

the harbour was pretty good, and I suppose that’s why they selected Morotai because they were looking for a hopping off spot to Borneo.

Some of them were fairly hefty sort of ships and some sort of an armed ship and there were lots of sailors around so

I suppose they would have been destroyers or some boats that are smaller than that. I didn’t get into the navy so I don’t know very much about boats.

Yes, oh well, Australians were using the American ships. The Victory ship we had, because of course Australia didn’t have very many ships, but there some boats that were Australian that were going up and down the coast,

mainly some hospital boats.

Well we didn’t notice it because it was further back from where we landed and there was a fair bit of forest on the western side of the island, quite big trees and quite a bit of forest.

And when we were catching trips with these people driving trucks, we were sort of heading up to get up where the level was and we didn’t see that aerodrome until we drove up onto it. It was on a high peak of a mountain, of the island at that stage.

We didn’t have any responsibility in the advance party to go on the boat, but there wasn’t any advance party to go off the boat, and the advance party on the boat was just to be there and with no specific instructions,

just to be there and available to do what was necessary. So there was no problem with that.

I don’t know. I think they went on another boat, I think. Unless they put them in the boat before we left Wondecla. I’ve forgotten what happened there. But they were there anyway; we didn’t lose them.

Well there wasn’t much to do; it was a matter of getting to where we were camped. We had tents that we camped in and get all our gear ready, or have all our gear with us, our pack, our big pack and all of the clothes we had and blankets and that’s it, so we were swaggies in a different manner.

Well I suppose it was about a mile away from where we got off the boat and so we just, it was a clear spot where they had all the tents and we just took over.

Didn’t have to do anything.

Nothing. There was no construction or anything at all except an aerodrome and tents where you wanted them to be and an outdoor film area that was in a spot where you could look at it.

No they were put up for us. That’s my memory of it. It’s a long time ago to think about those infinitesimal things.

Well we didn’t notice where they were; I don’t think there were any constructed accommodations,

I think that they were under tents as well. I’m not sure.

It might have been five or six miles away.

There? We didn’t have any contact whatsoever except I made contact with the doctor when this fellow hurt his arm,

or whatever it was, cut himself.

Whatever it was that, he’s cut his arm and we were up in the area where the tanks were and our accommodation was four or five miles down the track and so no one was prepared to do anything and I said, “We’ve got to get him into something.” I said, “There’s an American

unit down the road here.” So it was only twenty-five minutes or so away. So I took him down and they were all Afro-Americans and they looked at me as if I was an intruder or something, staring at me and they said, “What do you want?” And I told them what I wanted. And they said, “Why did you come here?” And I said that I knew I could get it done here, and so they fixed him up and away we went.

So that was a very friendly attitude. But then I mentioned I think at Morotai that the white Americans wouldn't pick you up but the black Americans always did. And there was a big gap between them there.

Well to get from A to B was a

fair way to go and if you could get a ride you would, hold you hand up and if the right people pulled up or a truck pulled up, we’d just jump in the back and say where we wanted to get off and that was it.

Because they pass by, they didn’t stop for us.

But the African-Americans, they stopped every time. No problem at all, and that’s what the Australians are like in reality; they are like that.

I don’t know, just from what we’ve heard from both sides, they’re poles apart.

Absolutely surprising, amazing I thought. There they were in the field of war and hardly talked to each other.

I don’t know what other Australian troops, I’m only talking about our tank squadron.

Nothing at all except servicing our tanks. Of course they’d all been waterproofed in Australia, that was what we were doing before we left and they are waterproofed because the fact sometimes when the landing ship tanks come in, because they don’t know what the

water is like, what the ground is like, they might be a bit short, so that when the tank takes off they might be sort of half under water. I know one of our drivers was telling us that when he was getting off he could see all these fish and I said, “Where did you see all the bloody fish?” He said, “Straight in front of me.” I said, “What were the fish doing there?” He said, “Swimming.” So he was, he got off on one that was

dropped off short and it was deeper then he would have liked to have had it done, but as long as we had the exhaust out of the water, he can go, so he just went through the water and the fish went past. So that’s why they, that’s what does happened to them.

Well if it was deeper water in front

you’d just go under, you couldn't do anything about it then. You could be a goner but they must have done a lot of working out what the depth of water was in various places. I remember seeing a booklet produced about Borneo itself and they were talking about tides and everything else so they must have had their fingers on the pulse there about where to land.

There’s a lot of grease moving around here there and everywhere, things were tightened up and it worked fairly well because they had a particular spot where they knew the depth of the water and they took the tank underwater with one of these funnels coming from the exhaust and rode through this and up onto the other side and came back again,

then they searched it for leaks and it worked marvellously. I don’t know what sort of equipment it was they used, but it sealed it down pretty well.

No particular instructions at all. The

officers were given instructions and that came down to the sergeants and this was while we were on the boat, but unless your troop leader told you, you didn’t know what was happening. But we had a rough idea.

We knew we were going to Borneo. That’s where we were heading. But we didn’t know what to expect when we landed, or where we landed and

it all worked out fine because there was no one there, not where we were in any case.

I was prepared, yeah.

Oh well everyone went to sleep on the deck. It was a landing ship tank and it had a flat

deck and I remember Jimmy Lane, and we had lots of rain during that time, and Jimmy Lane made a stretcher on the top and he got wet the first night so after that he had his poncho over him and he slept most of the way on that stretcher. But there was nothing

to do. Sit around and wait. You know we were pretty good at that.

They all kept to themselves. I took note of the

people that were around me and they all seemed to be unconcerned and nothing happened . You never know what would have happened if we had come under fire. No one knows what their reaction will be. But we didn’t and when you look back at it, we were very fortunate. To my mind I think that Borneo was

left as an area for the Japs because they wanted the troops everywhere else and the people that were there, because when they came in, when the armistice was all carried out, they were a very surly, cranky mob and it transpired that most of those had come from Korea or wherever the Japs had had a lot of armies. And they

hadn’t lost a fight in any of those areas and they were just acting as guards in Borneo, so they weren’t very keen on the fact that they were taken prisoner. As a matter of fact, they wouldn't come in after the armistice was called; they refused to. Somehow or other they got a special radio call from some of the people in Japan and then they came forward.

Well not a lot in the air while we were approaching but when we got within say approach of say ten miles off, the destroyers were whizzing off these, what do they call them, rockets and they had these

banks of rockets going, “Whit, whit, whit.” And they were going across the top of us with our landing ship tank and we were just hoping that none of them fell short and they didn’t, and there were aeroplanes coming in and dropping bombs in the area where we were going to be and they spent a lot of time doing that and they kept those rockets going until we were just about on the shore. And so it was

a pretty good coverage of cover for the people who were going to land.

Yes there was, but there wasn’t much on Muara Island, just a few little trees along the edge and the rest of it was sort of cleared and the rest of it had been bombed endlessly and there were just these big

bomb holes everywhere on the island, because there was supposed to be a submarine base there but there was nothing there when we got there. Whatever was there before they might have been a detail, we don’t know, or someone made a wrong interpretation.

That’s when I had my cup of tea. We got onto the island, Muara Island, just on the top of the bank and everything had stopped and we got a message back that there had been a troop of Japanese on the island and they had moved off. So there was this great big crater

alongside the tank, so I thought, “Cup of tea time”. So I put some more wood on, got the billy out and boiled it and within five minutes we had a cup of tea; very difficult war.

Well there was no particular reaction. Inwardly I suppose they thought, “Got over that hurdle, what’s the next one.”

No, there wasn’t any real, bit of a joke, the fact that we went through all this and there was no one on the island because the troops had left before we landed.

I think, I would think that they were that pleased to be in a position where at least

they were going to have a go at something and I think that was part of the attitude, that at least we were going to be part of the war. And after having some of that troop in Australia from say 1940 to ’45, five years up and down the coast, and at the same time digressing, there were tanks in Western Australia doing the same thing and they didn’t get away.

Not really, you can occupy yourself in the army. There must have been a lot of disappointments, lots of people who wanted to go overseas; that’s what they joined up for. You would think there would be a lack of control of

people because of that but the army had lots of outlets to look after what might have happened with those sort of things like sending people on leave when they missed out on going overseas, or doing all sorts of other things. So they seemed to handle those sorts of things pretty well. And the Australians themselves were pretty good, I thought. Well I suppose

a lot of them would think, “If we stay here, we won’t get shot down”. But it was the war effort and you were supposed to be available and everyone looked forward to it I think. I don’t think very many people went to war and were scared to pieces about it.

I wasn’t really concerned about very much at all. Thought about it and wondered what other people thought about it and didn’t get concerned about it and the fact that we were going ashore, threw all these things overboard, you had too many things to think about to be worrying about yourself. And of course the trust of the rest of your soldiers, well

that keeps things going; you don’t have any worries then. If you were worried about someone not supporting you if you got into awkward situations, well that would have been a worry. That never happened.

No, can’t recall. I didn’t take much notice of that.

Yes well it was a fair way off dawn by the time we got there because we were in light of day when they were shelling the beaches etcetera. So it wasn’t a dawn raid, but we weren’t very far away at dawn so that there was just a long day.

Well that was on the day we landed and for whatever reason, they decided to leave us on the island, or not so much leave us on the island, put us back on the landing ship tank and we waited there and the next morning we went to Brooketon which was the main road that went into

Brunei township. So we went across there the next morning.

Absolutely nothing, I think it was probably a weekender for some of the Japanese troops, because there was a lot of evidence of women being in the area. So I think it was a friendship camp.

Well they were ladies of the night.

Japanese.

Well I don’t know, this was just what was told to me, we didn’t do any search in Brooketon itself because everyone had moved out and that was what the rumourmongers said of the place.

I don’t think so; I don’t think there was anyone there. There were a few Japanese of course who were there, some of them got through our lines because of the fact that they, there were so many other native people there who were marching up and down this road, that they could have gone through and I often think about some that. I looked at and thought,

“Gee, he looks like a Japanese.” Meandered off, and they finished in front of us all the way.

To Brooketon? Well we camped that night and we followed the 13th Battalion, which was the infantry battalion, all the way

to Brunei township and we crossed across the aerodrome half way through and we were instructed to go to a township where we stayed overnight and then the next day they sent us back to the aerodrome just in case there were any planes had landed there, Japanese planes. Nothing happened.

It was a muddy little place with lots of people with the kampongs, with the villages on stilts in the water. It’s like a little alcove on the other side of the river and there was all completely, the mangrove swamp, completely filled with these little houses. There

were not much of a lasting type of building in the township, it was pretty poor at that stage but now it’s a thriving township because of the oil.

No because we knew that we would be moving somewhere else to catch the Japanese, and that’s what happened.

The Japanese scooted along the front, and the 13th Battalion behind them and they got all the way down to Miri and past Miri there was a road called Riam Road that ran down the coast and at Miri township itself they had a huge bit of a ridge itself running from the south end of the township to the north end of the township and

Riam road ran out down this side mountain, down the coast, so the instructions were we don’t go any further than this. So we sat there until the war finished.

No we went from Brunei by LST down to Miri. I don’t know how we did it but we got across the river

and where we were camped on the eastern side.

Well this ridge that we were talking about joined the river on the northern side and we were camped alongside the road, right alongside the river and in front of us was this giant hill and the 13th Battalion had

taken over on that and we were sitting there just waiting. Nothing happened except a couple of prisoners of war came through and they were Indians and they’d been released for some reason or other and as our officer mentioned, these Indians who had been prisoners of war for four or five years or three or four years, whatever it was, they had a sergeant major

who called them into order and they were all lined up and he marched them into our little camp and handed them over to our boss.

There were only about half a dozen, so the only ones that survived.

Pretty skinny, but no they were standing upright, swinging their arms, marching like soldiers, after what they’d been through.

Not a lot, I have to say. Most of it came out later, didn’t it? In August, no we didn’t have a lot of knowledge about

what went on in Singapore or the other places, it was only the gradual learning of what had happened, when a lot of information came out. And of course they had regular newspapers, even though some of them might have been American. The Americans printed a lot of paper. So we didn’t learn about it until later.

No I didn’t have any idea at all except that they were nice and skinny. One reason that they would be would be that they didn’t get anything to eat or didn’t get very much to eat. So I wouldn’t have a clue.

We were at a little place called Puget, where this ridge came down to the river and the good part about it was there was a special issue of beer, two bottles each, having won the war.

No I can’t recall a lot of tremendous

outpourings of joy, just that the war was over and that was it. It was probably lots of reasons to get excited about it particularly people who had, Mums and Dads who still had their sons in the army, they’re the ones who would have been feeling very

happy about it all. But no there wasn’t any big deal, except we had a bit of a party, as much of a party as you can on two bottles of bear. Red hot at that stage; didn’t have any fridges.

Well my brother went earlier and

Mum and Dad knew that I was going to join up in, (UNCLEAR). I was just thinking about that state of joining, I think that you’re still a juvenile until age twenty one going back to 1940, so we were responsible to our mother and father, so that would have to come into the reason for me

fluctuating, because I was only eighteen I think when I enlisted, nineteen I think it was. But…

I don’t know. I did get some letters from Mum expressing, you know, “Look after yourself, be careful, look out for all those stray bullets,”

and innocuous things like that.

I thought how bloody lucky am I. Everyone

said the same, “Christ we’ve been lucky”.

Yes that was one of the things we talked about. You know, why was it we were waiting all this time to come overseas and then we did a giant march onto the beachhead and took that with the flag flying and we didn’t come across any problems

at all. I think there was only one loss; one Australian lost his life. Back, from my knowledge of it, he got killed out at Miri, they went out on the track somewhere chasing these Japanese and the Japanese were holed up in a corner somewhere and he was the leading soldier and he got shot. So they

sort of stymied their search parties after that.

That was in August and they sent around notice for people to volunteer to go to Japan and there were a couple of other fellows

like myself who decided they would have a look at Japan, of course they wouldn't get away, that was my feeling on it, wouldn't get off the island, our island, so we left Brunei, by mainly ship tank I think it was again and headed off for Morotai on the

Saturday in November I think it was, Saturday in August, might have been still in August. And the Caulfield Cup was run that day. That’s what I can remember when we left and we went to Morotai but that’s where the problem lay because we were there from the end of,

well say, from November until the end of January before we left. And there was what we all referred to as a mutiny on the island because there was great promises about us going to Japan, ‘straightaway the boats will be ready, get set, get ready to go’, and nothing was happening. And the Americans

they were there and everywhere we went eventually, the Americans had been, we’d taken over from them. It transpired that there were a lot of problems amongst the troops that had volunteered to enlist and they weren’t going where they should be going, so much

so that on one of the stretchers there was someone missing and on the stretcher , somebody had written in paint, ‘Unlike MacArthur, I shall not return.’ He’d whizzed off somewhere and there were a few people who whizzed off on boats and came back to Australia by themselves. Don’t know what happened to them. But eventually

a boat pulled into Morotai for us and we headed off for Japan and struck another typhoon, so we were having great luck with the typhoons.

Well we played football. I don’t think there was any cricket. We were playing football on the aerodrome

and that was gravel. I often wonder about footballers today who complain about the hard grounds. They’re getting it easy, but I can’t recall exactly what we did. We did a lot of searching for cowrie shells, those little cowrie shells. Avoided the coral snakes, everyone got their share of those.

But there wasn’t much to do; they had a picture show every night. With those outdoor picture shows, particularly army ones and I’ve read so much about them, is that they’re not very viable, they seem to break down a lot, there was always trouble with the films, and what have you. And every night we went down to the pictures, there’d be a break and then eventually someone started talking about the things and yelling

out and on one occasion, this was the last occasion, these things started to break down again and a lot of people would get up and walk home and someone started an argument with the fellow who was running the film and he was probably doing a better job than anyone else could, but this

ruddy old stuff that they had and they were telling this cinematographer fellow what he could do with his film etcetera, etcetera and he said, “Well I’m going to close down.” And they, “Well, we’ll close down too,” and nobody ever went down to the pictures again. It just died an unusual death. So people do get a bit upset

during the war, but they got upset afterwards.

One word covers that, discipline. Discipline, it’s amazing, that’s a true word. Apply it to the army blokes.

Well by the actions of these people. We had been to the pictures at that same picture place at Morotai on our way through and everyone was circumspect and they had the same troubles with it breaking down but no problem,

nobody worried about it, they knew they could get up and walk home or they had to wait for the truck in any case. And we used to get a truck from where we were down the other end of it, up along the first (UNCLEAR) and we would probably be knocking ourselves if we decided that we were going to walk home when we know that we only have to wait a bit longer and you’d have a lift home. Yeah I think there is a big difference in that.

And you stop and think about what was a, well it was a mutiny, because what happened was that the, but everyone knew it was going to happen and I think the officer in charge he knew what was going to happen, he probably organised what would happen that the sergeants wouldn't go on parade. What was going to happen was that the other troops were

going to call a, trying to think of the word, call on the troops to march out onto the aerodrome. And we all walked onto the aerodrome and they had built a stand for the officers, with the microphones and I was in a,

there was a sig [signal] unit in what was then the 66th Battalion and their corporal did all the wiring for it and when this officer marched onto the platform and picked up the handpiece, he nearly got electrocuted, an electric shock. And most of us thought, “Hell that’s done it.” But then they talked and talked and talked and there was an officer from headquarters somewhere or other giving us all

that bulldust about what it was going to be like and beautiful playing fields and you’ll be on the ones that the Americans had, grassy areas, lovely. When we got there, it was just bloody gravel. Everywhere we went, it was just gravel. Only moved on two occasions. But no there was a different attitude of the people in Morotai. And when you think of what was basically a

mutiny, it wasn’t treated as such, it was only a question of trying to get the message across to all the troops. And I think the old colonel had called a parade in any case so that he could say he was on parade to do that purpose.

Yeah. And it wasn’t very long then before we headed off.

No nothing at all, except of course there had been talk about having a corporal’s mess and something else. Everything was cancelled. All the things that had been promised, he just cancelled the whole lot of them. But everyone forgot about that, we were on our way and that was the end, that was, you know, “Lets’ move on.” they say these days. And that’s what we did.

Not to my knowledge. There was no future in having fights, no future at all. If you want a fight go into the boxing ring.

Well our view was and the army view was, it all came down through the grapevine, was that it was going to cost the Americans a million soldiers to get their foot on Japan. And we believed that. And as far as the bomb was concerned, that stopped the war and allowed all the Australian soldiers to get home alive.

But when you stop and think about it, there is another story to that altogether.

In the army yeah, where we were yeah. No one said anything about, very few people were not talking about the result of it, they were talking about the fact of what was achieved.

But when I got to Hiroshima that day and looked at it, I thought, “Christ, why did they do this?” The desolation, there was absolutely nothing. I don’t know how many were killed there but oh dear. Dear oh dear. And the Americans still haven’t learnt.

Well I was on the advance guard again. When we got off the boat they had an advance party to go to Kitachi, which was about ten miles from Kure. And very next day we decided we’d have the day off and we were going to go to Hiroshima to have a look.

And the rail service was still on still going and we jumped on a train at Kitachi and got off at Hiroshima. We were surprised when we got to Hiroshima train station because it was still standing there as if nothing had happened, but then when we walked out through the railway station to look on what was the western side I think, there was nothing there.

My memory of it was there were two building which were only half knocked, had the tops knocked off them and they either concrete or steel and I think there were a couple of newspaper buildings and they were there and the rest of it was just flat. Except of course this was in February of 1946 then and there were a couple of little huts built up around the place

and that happened all the time, slowly there were new little huts and there was a creek running alongside this railway station and it was just desolate, as far as the eye could see. Looking back the other way, which would be the east or the north – I’ve forgotten the layout of the city – it was

not so bad at all. Surprisingly, some of the stuff that was on the edge of the hills, as they were, escaped a lot of danger, but most of it seems to have been destroyed towards the big river further down.

We didn’t, I often wondered why we didn’t organise parties to go to hospitals to either help or have a look at it and nothing like that happened. I don’t know why, so we didn’t see the face of the results of what had happened to those people who were alive, but eventually

we saw so many photographs of it. And whilst we won the war, I think we won it the wrong way.

Well I was aghast really. Most of the fellows with me were aghast at what the result was and I suppose the feeling of that they were going to lose a million troops and that was the way we thought about it, took a long while for me to

forget about that answer and think about what really had happened, and what could happen in the future. So to my mind that was the wrong thing to do and I was mostly very highly opposed to anyone who thinks otherwise.

Wars in particular are killing fields and they don’t achieve anything at all. The history books might look good but that’s not the answer, the full answer is that the cost of a war is never shown. So I don’t agree with what our government is doing at the moment, have done in Iraq. And I’m surprised at the number of people who are supposedly decent

supporting it.

No well I don’t think the Australians have learnt, the same as the Americans haven’t learnt. I mean they got mixed up in Korea and that’s something that happened quickly and

didn’t last too long thank goodness and that wasn’t a political war as what we would talk about as all these others are. Like in, what’s the name of the place, Vietnam, that was a sorry sad affair unfortunately and worldwide politics

caused that and the Americans still won’t admit that they made a mistake. But I don’t know how they do but they’re still making excuses for what they do. So anyone who has been in the army and particularly anyone who has had the fortune or misfortune

to go to Japan and see Hiroshima, how can they support anything that was going to kill off civilians like happens in war. So in effect, no one has learnt. Not only the Americans, everyone else, the English, Australians, what are your thoughts about it?

You’re being very diplomatic.

Yeah we went straight to Japan from Morotai. We ran into a typhoon and it was another

Victory ship and there wasn’t very much room for sitting down having meals and those who were a bit late had to find a spot either on the deck or inside somewhere. And I can recall this particular spot, there was something soup and something else and this ship moving around a bit. So we stayed inside. And this fellow came up and he was carrying a meal in one hand and

a flat plate of soup and he wondered what to do and he put something under his arm and he opened the door and of course as you would expect he puts his hands out first and ‘whoosh’ the wind got it and took everything away.

Not so much as I would have thought. It was different sort of typhoon I think,

the previous one was more rolling but ours was charging through so it couldn't have been as rough a sea, but it’s amazing what people will do. I don’t know what he expected to happen to his plate of soup when he passed it out.

Very mountainous,

and we were coming into the Inland Sea and heading for Kure, so you don’t get any visual impressions but when we got into the bay itself it was during the daylight, there were dozens and dozens of ships that had been sunk. I don’t know whether they had been sunk by the Americans bombing the bay,

as they had been, because Kure itself was bombed to pieces and there were just skeletons, there must have been a lot of manufacturing areas around there and they were probably solid steel construction, but all these shells around the place and yes it was and it was dull and it was the middle of winter, or just after the middle of winter, so just gloomy and cold.

That’s how I’d describe it.

Pretty chilly of course it’ll tell you. And we all felt the cold and we all had our greatcoats on and, what was I going to say,

I’ve forgotten what I was going to say. Any case talking about being cold, we had an issue of four blankets and for whatever reason I finished up with five blankets and I thought, “Shall I leave it here?” when I was at Morotai and I thought, “No, I’ll take it with me.” So when we got out to Kitachi, and got settled in there and next morning we were heading off to look at Hiroshima and

I had this spare blanket and I thought “oh”, and I put it around me, and I put my overcoat over it and did up my belt and I kept myself warm all the way and when we’d had a look around at the railway station we decided that there must have been a brewery site here somewhere, someone had said there was a brewery, so we had to find it. So I eventually found it away in the distance, away from where the bombing was

on the opposite side of where the bombing was, and it was big building standing intact. So when we got there the gates were locked and we knew that they still made beer and here we are talking Australian and they’re talking Japanese and no one knew what was happening. We tried like mad to try and get inside so we could do a bit of a deal with them

but they wouldn't be in it so I thought, “Here it goes,” so I opened up the coat, took the blanket out and all their eyes lighted up and they opened the doors and in we went. And we got as much beer as we could carry and we took it back to Kitachi and we told the engineers that we were there, (UNCLEAR) the engineers, but we got a beer at the brewery and that.

Yes we got some beer and got back to Kitachi and we told the engineers and they seemed to have control over a lot of things and they had transport that we didn’t have, so they apparently must have taken a big truck up and I think they must have half-filled it with food because when they came

back they had all these wooden cases of beer that had a dozen bottles in them. Seemed to be standard English size, standard Australian size and they would have been stacked as high and as square as this room. As much as they, might have been a bit more than they could have fitted on the truck so it was something like that.

Anyway there were dozens and dozens of cases. There we are with all this beer, “What are we going to do with this?” So we had free beer for about a fortnight for three weeks and then slowly the other people found that we had some beer there, so there were lots of parties going on and they got rid of it eventually. So much for the brewery

and my blanket.

There was a lot of conjecture about what would happen when we got to Japan and whilst I wasn’t aware of any specific instructions that they had given,

except no fraternisation. I don’t know why they insisted on that but they make the laws, and you get to meet people only unless you’re out on patrol or doing something or other or going into towns or shops, things like that. They weren’t there because everything was blown up or burnt to pieces in that area.

And we could gauge only from a lot of the people we employed in the 66th Battalion. And they worked in the cooking house and had a lot of women working around the place and there was a very friendly attitude and we didn’t strike anyone that was other than that, except for a few specific incidents and I’ll tell you about a couple of them,

and we were astounded how calm it was. You’re coming in, you’re taking over, you’ve won the war and you feel somehow that it might be how it is in Iraq at the moment. A bit apprehensive, and some of them might have been apprehensive but we weren’t, I wasn’t, I thought that everything would be ‘hunky-dory’ [all right], as it turned out to be,

and we didn’t have a lot of dealings with the Japanese but gradually all the Australians did, transport areas and what-have-you, and in that way I think the Australians did a very good job in that they got the message across to nearly all the Japanese that they were here to help them, not to do anything else. And that’s what they did

and so I don’t know that there was any animosity at all. One of the most important things of us being there was the fact that we brought all the food and provisions into the place and what did they want? They wanted food, because there was a shortage of food. So that wherever there was an outlet of food, you got volunteers, so you got plenty

of Japanese who would work in that situation, so that whatever happened we provided a lot of food and whilst a lot of that might have been disposed of through the transport area at the docks sometimes, there was a bit of a problem about food going off, and we didn’t know very much about it but we heard some stories about it and they must have

been racketeers of some description, and wherever you went you were received really well. Didn’t have any problems with anyone at all, except with the language. Learning to speak the language. That was one of the biggest mistakes that the army made. They didn’t set off to make everyone learn Japanese and they should have

because it made things so much easier, but …

You know you can talk sign language, hands work marvellously, particularly if you want to buy something you can point to it etcetera, and yes it’s not easy and you can make friends

easily, particularly if you give lollies to the kids. That was one of the things that happened to me, the girl who rang me before said, “What did you do at night?” And I said, “Go to bed.” Because there weren’t any films anywhere that we went to that I can recall but what I forgot to tell her is that the canteen was open six nights a week and the canteen

was in the, and this is another story, the canteen was in a big building, twice as wide as this and twice as long and it had aluminium top tables running up and down, and this was the eating area, this was an American place and I don’t know whether the Americans had set it up that way but it looked like it. And so on one side you had these tables and on the other side

you had the cooking area where the Japanese were cooking or whoever was doing it. When the meals were over and we were all cleaned up, we’d come back and that was the canteen, this is where we sat down and had our beers. And the system was that we had Australian bottled beer and there were a couple of Australians in charge of that and they filled up all these glasses or jugs, as they were I think.

And there was all this rush after tea to get back on the corner of the tables would be first with the serving because they had little Japanese fellows running up and down taking a jug and bringing it back and then coming back and it was something going on all night. In any case we noticed that, not me, in the kitchen area they opened up lots of foodstuff like frozen meat and

one of the tricks was halfway through the night when the Japanese were at the other end of the room, one of the fellows would jump over the counter and come back with a handful of chops. And it happened that I was in charge of a sig hut which is in the middle of the parade ground and we had one of those little burners, Japanese ones that was a coil burner and so we used to cook these chops and steak and whatever in the

sig hut. That was a bit (UNCLEAR) but that’s the way it was.

I was in the signal section of the 66th Battalion and we had a storeroom and I forget what happened but I had hurt my leg playing football, no I hurt my leg I fell

out of a telephone pole in Hiro. Damaged my back and my leg. So I was on no duties so I was put in charge of the sig store where we stored all our equipment, ropes and wires and things. And they shifted us from one place to another because there was a new sig hut being constructed for us. And this was all made out of timber, beautiful smell

and so I shifted over and that night someone grabbed some food and brought it back and we had a feast. What we would do, have you seen those tins that you have cakes in, with the tin lid? This is what the army, when you joined the war the mothers would bake a cake and put it together, sew it up and send it away to us and we used one of those as a pan and put this on top of the heater and

that sig hut didn’t smell the same ever again. So getting to know the Australians and plus getting to know the Japanese as well.

I can’t think of anything in particular. All our activities were confined to this area where we were. For some reason or other they hired, the other side of Hiro, they hired a house that had a tennis court on it. And so we used to go and play tennis there

and that was giving work to another lot of Japanese. And you get to know them, only because you were in contact that way. The contact wasn’t that easy earlier on but having spoken to some people that were there after I left, I was there for the twelve months and that was it and what happened was that some stayed another couple of years and then a lot of them

got caught up in the Korean War, because they were there before the Korean War finished and the 66th Battalion apparently all marched forward in one go and they all went away to Korea. And a lot of our good mates got killed there, so Lady Luck stays with you or stays against you, doesn’t it.

Being at the right place at the right time, that’s Lady Luck I reckon.

Well you don’t count on it but it does happen sometimes. You can only look forward and avoid what the eventual thing might be and I think everyone did that, we did that pretty well as a battalion I reckon

and as a regiment, and we were lucky that the war didn’t continue. So if you look at Lady Luck you would say the armoured division were a bit lucky, without, you could say that without thinking seriously about it. But they were a bit unlucky that they didn’t go overseas, but a lot of them would have preferred to have gone overseas than to have stayed at home.

Hard to cut your finger on that. Some people are lucky in everything they do. You’ll meet people in your life that seem to win all the prizes, win the raffles, and so my luck must be running out because I’m playing bowls and I’ve been winning five dollars on the lucky draw, every time I go down there. And that’s only a small amount.

Well it wasn’t particularly odd except for the fact that they were all skinny bins. And there was a food shortage in Japan, there is no doubt about that,

to such an extent that I’ve got an article by a fellow by the name of Kelin, he was a journalist of some description, he was in the 66th Battalion. And he stayed on for about four years and he wrote a book and that’s an excerpt from the book and it mentioned there the fact that, what were we talking about

Lady Luck were we?

Yes he was talking then about the fact that when we first arrived in Kure and I was on the same ship as he was, the Stanford Victory, he said it arrived there on the 13th of March, 13th February, I thought it was in January,

but we stayed there the night and we got fed and there was a big tin put out for scraps and when we were having our meals it was in an area which had a bit of a verandah on it, outside, and suddenly all these faces appeared in the background, mostly kids carrying receptacles and they were waiting for everyone to finish their meal so that they could take what was left. And that happened every night.

And he said wherever they went they were lacking in food.

We didn’t have any of that. But this was an area where there was food, they knew it was going to be available and they weren’t begging for it, they were just taking it because it was left. I didn’t see any beggars at all.

What the food taken from Australia?

I don’t know but some of it must have filtered down to the Japanese. I don’t know how it would have happened, but I think it must have happened. Apparently there must have been a mafia there as well in that there were stories about a lot of foodstuffs being missing

from the wharf area. So that would have to be some people, what would you call them, thieves in the night, so that it would have to get around somehow or other. So I don’t know whether the Australian units had any prepared job to hand out food but all the food that was available or left, they took it and

the 66th Battalion as well. That’s only a small number of areas we can see but apparently this fellow moved around a lot and they were short of food; that was one of their problems and that was conveyed to me by a prisoner of war who was in Japan and he worked in the tax office, he was a good friend of mine

and he said that the Japanese were hungry because they were lacking in food too, as the prisoners of war were getting very little food.

Rice, rice fields right up against where we were and obviously

the spot where we were had a house with tiles on the top because, and then it was taken down, and this was our football field and it was full of bits of tile. And there must have been a lot of vermin in it to because everyone that scratched their knees they’d finish up with some sort of a germ infection. Yes so

people in Australia don’t have any problem with nice hard cricket pitches like football grounds, however that was what we did. One of the other things we did was the Australians were chasing smugglers and they, these were people who were smuggling food in or food out or whatever else there was, so they had

this giant organisation and me being in the sigs, I went with them to look after the radio so we went to a little place called Akitomo, which was around the corner from where we were but a long way away. And we netted our radios in from where we were and I told the sergeant who was with us, he had been in the 2/9th Regiment, he was in the 66th Battalion.

And I said, “Look once you go around that corner there, we’ll never hear from you and he said, “No we’ll get through.” I said, “You’ve got a 116 radio.” And we had 119s on the tanks and they were excellent, but a 116 was an army one and it wouldn't go more than fifty yards. And as soon as they got around the corner, I lost contact altogether. So I’ll continue with the story, making friends.

I was there by myself. I was in charge of the kitchen and all these kids came along and I always carried some lollies for that very reason and I handed out the lollies to the kids and so that happened and I noticed that there was a boat fishing, a little old Japanese fella in his row boat, fishing boat, and he was pretty well organised because

he had fresh shrimps in a little container in the boat, so when the water went, when the boat went that way, took water on, in and out, and so he had the fresh bait and I noticed he was catching fish that looked like bream which is part of our fish. And I got the message through some kids that he was to come in when he finished. So he did come in and he had

all these big bream, so I used my hands and we swapped, he gave me half a dozen bream and I gave him half the kitchen. And so that was that and he was all ready to go and some of the kids who I’d given the lollies to had come back so I gave them some more and this ex Japanese bloke came and he had his army uniform on as if he was an officer

or a mountain horseman or something, and he came along and he wanted some of these. Oh that’s right, what he’d done with the food was to go down to the fishermen, who’d been given all this food, and the fishermen wanted it because they didn’t have food, they had money, they all had plenty of money but nowhere to spend it, so he had a good deal, he gave me the fish and he got all the food that he wanted. And this officer fellow went down

and talked him into accepting money for all his food. So I thought, “I’ll catch up with you.” And so this fellow came along and followed these young kids into the place where I’d been giving them lollies and he wanted some lollies. So I thought, I’ve got two Atebrin tablets in my pocket, so I took them out and put them in my mouth and put it behind my tongue and said, “There you are, take one of those.”

So I gave it to him and I said, “Chew it up.” And I chewed it up, with the thing behind and he started to chew. He didn’t come back. So you get square somehow or other. A bit unkindly I suppose.

That was the only time we had fresh fish. I don’t know, I suppose

there’s wasn’t that much available at that stage because there weren’t that many ships or boats around where there were fishermen. But no we didn’t, to my knowledge we didn’t get any fresh fish.

Well it was exchanging foodstuff for money and then you bring the money back and you buy beer,

so it goes back into the Australian government’s purse. All you do is you’re pushing it through a circle. We used to get an issue of lollies, peanut bars and things like that, so if you ran short of money all you had to do was go down to Hiroshima and exchange it for money and they had plenty of money and no food.

There was a market place that grew up in that area, little huts spread up everywhere and everyone had something to sell and that’s what happened to most of the lollies.

If you were talking about us, we were a signalling unit. There is a signalling unit in every battalion. Most of the people who were in this sig unit came from New Guinea way where the 6th Division had been and they were called beach sigs, so they were responsible for running lines when they got to the beach, running lines up to the front areas,

wherever they were, and to keep everyone in contact with each other. That wasn’t necessary in a battalion where we were; it was just a sig unit that looked after the telephones. And that was one of my jobs eventually, in the sig hut operating a switchboard.

And cooking steaks and chops.

Yes I read an article on that, in that thing I was reading, the fella who wrote the book. He explained the financial system the way it was, that they were all short of food, so it was just all switching it around and it all finished back in the canteen.

Physical? Well we were always in good nick and of course the Atebrin was an anti-malaria tablet. And of course they didn’t work on me, that was one of the things that happened to me at Kitachi, I got all these fainting fits etcetera, and the doctor said, “You’ve got malaria,” and so they sent me into hospital, a

hospital at Idojima which is in the middle of the bay of Kure. So I spent a fortnight or so in there. And that, I got that malarial shot on, I reckon on, at Brooketon. When we landed on Brooketon or Muara Island, that’s where I got my shot of malaria.

Because that’s where so many bloody mosquitos

were, and that’s to my knowledge where it came from. We didn’t have any trouble with malaria on Morotai and so we were a long, long way away from malarial areas, so that’s my summation. Now I’m stuck with it.

I don’t there is a great deal of difference except they bite. The malarial mosquitos, I think is a bit bigger, I’m not sure. No, they just, they’re the ankle biters. But we had, suppose to have gloves

and your sleeves down. As much as you try you can’t keep away from those mosquitos.

In some places you did yes.

Shorts.

And I don’t know I think we had some jumpers, somehow or other they were unearthed, along the line, football boots and socks and shorts. And here we go.

I don’t know, they must have come from Australia, see the sort of comforts fund or the Salvation Army, it could have been through that way. And we had our football boots at Morotai, so there

have been a lot of people stationed at Morotai here and there, so they came from Australia somewhere.

Yeah well, the ball came with the boots. See we had the same football, not the same football team because I wasn’t in the one at Morotai, they

didn’t know what a good footballer I was. In any case I used to score lots of tries, and we had football boots there and we had footballs, so they would have all come up in some comfort fund package somehow or other.

We played against the sixty, there were three battalions I think 65th and 66th and 67th,

I don’t know where 67th was but 65th wasn’t far away. We played all those people in town and we also played against the air force who were at I think they were north or south of us, Iwakuni that was their base, Iwakuni.

And that’s how we played football and we all finished up with scratches.

Because of the rough ground and because it was part of the paddy field where they had the football field, the rice was right alongside of us.

No that was the point. We never ever got into any area where they had food for sale and that’s an indication of a shortage. There were no eating-houses in Kitachi or any of the places we were. That must have changed eventually, surely. But that’s an indication that there is a shortage of food because food is a money producer.

Kitachi was on a bay; it was the big long sheds were naval store sheds. And they were air conditioned which meant the floorboards were half an inch between each other, up and down the same way. And they were as cold as a mother’s heart.

Your grandmother’s heart. Your mother-in-law. I got it right eventually. So that was where the, what were we talking about…

And it was completely flat towards the south I think it was. This was all reclaimed land

from Kure Bay and it was used by the naval stores depots and the navy put all their equipment in there.

How long?

I think until the summer. It was a long while, yeah.

No I think we were issued with the uniforms before we left and we had them with us; we had an overcoat and the army jacket and that was warm, so they were all very warm, but there was something I was going to say and now I’ve forgotten about.

Couldn't have been important or otherwise I would have remembered it.

Well the huts were, it was impossible to heat the huts at Kitachi

and when we got there we found that there was water supply but it was cold and this was the middle of winter and some of the fellows decided to have a shower and they had a shower in this cold water and the performances they put on. I thought, “Okay, when they put hot water on here, I’ll shower.” So one of the fellows said, “We’ll christen you ‘Chats’.” And I said, “What does ‘Chats’ mean?” And he said, “Dirty, grubby blokes.”

But we overcame the shortage, because we’d get on the train and go into Kure house where we first started, where they had a bathroom there so we’d have a bath. So that overcame the name, it didn’t last too long.

Chats and Hungry, yeah. But while we’re talking about beer,

which we’re not, the thing that intrigued us was the fact that we had a supply, even after having got all the beer in the first place, and we had ample beer, then when everything got organised there was a ration of Australian beer and I think it was two bottles a fortnight. Big deal.

So we decided we would save up our beer until we had four or five bottles of beer each and we organised for the padre’s batman to get us some saki. And I said to this bloke, “Where are you going to get it?” And he said, “Oh the old bloke gets it for his, you know, when he holds sermons, etcetera, you’ve got to have alcohol.”

So he got these couple of big bottles of sake and we all drank our beer and we were drinking this sake and first time for all of us to have tasted it. “Just lolly water. What are they talking about?” In any case, when I woke up, I was asleep at the switchboard, sin of all sins. So it’s really alcoholic and it’s really strong stuff.

It’ll catch you unawares. But that didn’t happen again so you’ve got to learn by your, I stuck to the beer.

No, I didn’t pass out, the memory got me; I just went to sleep.

That’s right. Well you soon learn. We even manufactured

some beer. Christmas, one Christmas while we were at Wondecla on the Tablelands. And for whatever reason, it started somewhere, that we should have some beer for Christmas because there was never guaranteed supply up there and so if someone decided we’ll make a brew of our own, someone knew something and knew where to get stuff. So we had one of the officers was the organiser

to make sure there was nothing illegal done about it, so that we weren’t going to kill ourselves with too much strong alcohol, and we had a forty-four gallon oil drum and we cut it in two and we washed it and made all this beer and we put it all in bottles and sealed it and two of our party did that and they hid it in a cool room that the 6th Division

had left behind. And they put all these bottles together and they bottled them all up and left them in the place. And then when we came back two days before Christmas the word came around, all illegal alcohol is to be destroyed. So everyone got a few bottles to hide out of the way and most of it was hidden in a heap of wood, which was right down the end of our area

where we had the tanks. And we got down there on Christmas morning, it was nice and hot and every time somebody opened a bottle of beer it went “pop!’ And that was it. And they all tried all sorts of ideas about how they could get it, what they could do. And one fellow said, “I’ve got it all settled. I know what to do.” So he took the lid off one and put it in his mouth and nearly blew himself away. However, silly things that happen.

Well they got it from the store in Ravenshoe because as far as beer is concerned and the same as most Australians are so they knew what to do. So yes, it would have been a good idea if it had worked.

By going to church. Never any Christmas cake at Christmas, just one of the things that doesn’t happen.

I don’t think so, not to my knowledge. I know the Americans look after

themselves because on the landing ship tank going across to Borneo from Morotai, for some reason or other I fell foul of this sergeant major, so he said, “You’re going on kitchen duty.” And he must have known that he’d done something to help me because when I got there down in the kitchen, the work I had to do, I found out it was Thanksgiving Day

for the Americans, so they were cooking turkey. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.” And they had heaps and heaps of turkey and iced tea and ice cream in the middle of a war. You’ve got to be lucky.

Yes we were supposed to be, I think it was put on by the Americans and the Australians, to let some of their troops get into Tokyo and so we went from Kure, Hiro, and I don’t know whether it was a fortnight or three weeks,

but it was a hectic two or three weeks, and we were there on guard duty, but I was only looking at the photographs this morning, that I dug out, and we were in front of the building that MacArthur was in. And of course we had Lee Enfield rifles with a sabre on the front of it and we had to come to attention

and present arms when any officer came along, major or over, and after a couple of days of that we just stand to attention, and no one ever worried, so we were just like an alarm clock, “Tick, tick, tick.” So we did that in lots of areas, I think it was sixteen hours on and eight off.

So, in one particular spot we were in, they had the officers club there and I had the guard duty out the back and out the back they had a nice little cover for the guard. I don’ know whether they had them there all the time, since they built the place and there was a seat there, so I used to sit down and I found a Japanese who could talk my language and I used to have

a cup of tea every half hour. And then, at night we were supposed to be inside the building looking around, making sure that everything was unde r control. And what we found downstairs was that there was a billiard table. So we never went to sleep, we were always playing billiards. No one ever got in or got out either. But Tokyo, there was something

akin to Hiroshima, except that it got burnt out, so there were lots of old buildings standing and lots of steel and structures and it was a hustle, hustle town at that stage. I remember going down the Ginza a couple of times. The Yanks had one of their canteen-type things; I forget what they called it, PK or something or other [PX – Post Exchange, American canteen unit],

and we had access to that to buy any food that we wanted and we used to go there quite often. But it was interesting; we didn’t get to see a great deal. And we didn’t go to any areas where we could get food either. So it depended on doing our own catering, not single but with the unit. We were

working with a lot of Americans there, that’s where we got closer to the Americans than ever and we met a lot of them from all different areas and they were prepared to have arguments about politics and they were very concerned about whether you were in the union or not and what union you were in, because most of these fellas were mostly from the coalmining areas up near Pittsburgh or

somewhere or other. But they were quite interesting to spend some time with and we used to play cards with them and they have some sort of card game and because I knew a fair bit about cards I picked it up very quickly and I was doing things the wrong way around and he reckons I was cheating, because I couldn't understand the rules. And they were going to have a great argument about that, you know.

There wasn’t a great deal of interest in Japan, I can’t recall, I know the question you asked was, it might have been the girl who was talking to me before, about what we did at night at Hiroshima. And of course the canteen was open six nights a week so that looked after six nights and I’ve forgotten what the deal was in Tokyo but there must have been

some area where we got some grog because wherever you find an Australian you find grog not far away, particularly in the army. But it was just a bit, not disappointing but it was fairly drab. Well who wouldn't be after being, I mean the Americans set fire to Tokyo didn’t they. They blew the hell out of it, or burnt the hell out of it.

No not really, not the Americans in any case. While we were in Japan, we didn’t talk very much about politics, we didn’t talk very much about the army either. But I suppose that was what would keep us occupied in speech-making, I’m damned if I know.

My perception was that they were waiting for us to come, because they knew that we would bring food and that food eventually drifted down to them somehow or other.

And I know that all the people that worked at our place, the Japanese, you can’t tell me they didn’t have a pork chop occasionally. But anything that was excess after everyone had been fed, they took it away, the same as they did for the kids in Hiro. So they accepted us really well and

I don’t think, even though this fellow said there was this feeling about why are they so friendly, I think that it was quite obvious why they were so friendly, because they could get a feed somehow or other. Or they could make a quick buck.

Yes I think they did, I think they must have because the Japanese didn’t worry me and they did while the war was on. But there was a change of feeling after the war came along, particularly as far as Hiroshima was concerned, it started me thinking and whilst I’m talking about that, I can recall having lots of discussion about that, particularly in some of the places I used to

go and drink with people, speak with them. Various people, who would bring up the position of Hiroshima when it was mentioned that I’d been, that a mate of mine had been a prisoner of war and I spent some time in Japan and a lot of them still held the fact that it was a necessary thing to do. So I had lots of arguments about that. And that

showed that there was a change in my outlook from what we had until we saw what had happened in Hiroshima.

Christ yes, they got so close; they really got so close. And

we won the battle of the Coral Sea, and the Americans and the Australians won that, because the Japanese were there ready to land and the ships that they sank in the Coral Sea were the ships that were heading for, according to my reading, were heading for, what’s the main township in New Guinea?

Port Moresby. And they had

four or five cruise ships. They had a lot of troops there and they lost a hell of a lot of troops. And that’s where they started to go backwards. And given that they had been successful in there and taken over New Guinea, well they would have then been bombarding Queensland. And of course all our sailors were overseas. Not all, some of them had come back.

We wouldn't have had the strength to be able to push back all those Japanese; the numbers really count sometimes when it comes to reckoning. But no we were a bit lucky. Here we go again, a bit of native luck.

No we didn’t have that feeling. Although that Brisbane Line comes into mind now, do you understand what that’s all about? That was one of the dangers that was going to happen. If they let the Japanese on (UNCLEAR) at Brisbane that it would only be weight of numbers. And you see what happened in Singapore. So yes it could have happened.

I think that we can thank the air force and the navy for what they did there to get rid of all those Japanese ships and shoot down most of their planes.

No I didn’t strike any. We never had any problem with the Japanese in that respect. I can’t think of anywhere that anyone had a problem. The only time that I was a bit anxious was when some of the Japanese were coming back from,

it wasn’t Korea, it was Mongolia, wherever they were, where they had taken over from the Chinese and they were people, soldiers who had fought the fight and won the war up there, and they came back here and the war was over and they were the losers. And they were a very surly mob that we saw sometimes on the train. And there were lots of Koreans amongst them as well, in the Japanese army,

but they didn’t cause any problem to my knowledge; there could have been but we didn’t strike any.

No, because we only saw them on the trains.

Didn’t see them in the places that I lived, so obviously while the numbers were there in the trains, they would be shuttled off to where the villages were. No, I don’t think that, I’ve read a fair bit about Japan since I’ve come back, and I’ve never read any, I don’t think there was any history of any problems with the returning servicemen.

January ’47.

I was very happy to get out of the place because the hills were coming in on us. We had been there too long. And it gets back to what were you doing. We weren’t doing enough. And we were sort of in that same situation all the time. Occasionally

go for a swimming trip, the officers would take us down the bay somewhere, the trip with the smugglers and on one occasion we went up to the snowfields. That was another interesting little aspect of it. Yes well you’ve got a lot of people left there doing nothing, they’re going to get into trouble. They need to be looked after and that was why I was glad to get out of the place.

They were getting restless, there is no doubt about that and everyone was wanting to get away from the place, but I can’t, I haven’t got any recollection of any one causing any problems, because there it was discipline again. That’s what they had to do; they had to do what was expected of them.

By boat. Another one of those…no, it was one of the Australian or English boats. I’m just trying to think of the name of it. I know one of the signals on one of the areas was the old

epithet of ‘Let Loose the Dogs of War.’ There’s another part of that, that statement. It was one of the English ones. But the thing that I remembered mostly was coming through the heads. I got a bit of strong feeling then for the old homeland and it was great to be back.

I think it was six hundred and eighty days or something; I looked at my discharge certificate this morning some time, so it was about four and a half years. Discharge papers with leave taken into account was sometimes March or April

of 1947.

Yeah I went to Liverpool where my mother and father were living and I didn’t tell them I was coming. And so I suddenly appeared on the doorstep, that was probably the wrong thing to do with Mum, she got really upset then.

Bit emotional. Another son back. So we lived in Liverpool for another, about twelve months, and then we bought a house at Fairfield and that’s where we lived most of my working life, and finished up in Lansvale.

It was very difficult,

first of all I had to get some clothing coupons and buy some clothes and of course I bought a coat one day that I thought was just right and took it home and Mum made me take it back. It was like Joseph’s coat, all sorts of colours. So it took me a long while to get used to having to decide what sort of socks I had with what sort of trousers.

And it took a while to get used to things, sort of in-between. So what I did to overcome that, I used to spend a lot of time with one of the fellows, Bob McSweeney. I met him in Japan and we palled up and we used to get around together and when I came back I used to go down to his place in Leichhardt and I used to play tennis there and often

stay the night at his place, until I eventually settled into things and I joined the local RSL [Returned and Services League], no, I joined the football team, that was the best thing that I did because I started running then and got rid of all the weight I had on me. And I met a lot of people and it was through the football club that I met the lady that I’ve still got.

I think that one of the things that happened, all the servicemen that returned, it wasn’t very long before the war was forgotten about. Even to the stage

that my younger daughter got me to write this history of mine, because she didn’t know anything about it and of course we didn’t discuss the army at all, except at work sometimes when we were talking to some of the people who had been in the air force in England, and some of those who were in the desert and flying over the (UNCLEAR)

wherever it was in Germany. And that sort of tended to get used to that until eventually you’re not talking about it at all. And this is what my daughter said to me, “Why didn’t you tell me all about this?” I said, “Why didn’t you ask?” So see, most people, particularly of your age wouldn't know very much about what

happened during the war, except that you were doing the job that you were doing, because you wouldn't have been about then. And it’s surprising the number of people who didn’t have any relatives during the war and didn’t lose anyone during the war and they don’t know anything about what happened; absolutely amazing. You’d think that one of the things that happened during that

Second World War would have been instant teaching to everyone. But if it was, it hasn’t got through into a lot of areas.

Well everyone had about twelve months start on me, coming home. They were mostly all settled down; some of them were being married

or married at that stage. No there was just a funny feeling with some of them in the tax office who hadn’t served and they were always whinging about something or other that they didn’t have during the war. “All you fellas took all the bloody food away, we didn’t have any.” And even one fellow was telling me one day how fortunate we were because we could get razor blades and he said, “You know we couldn’t get them during the war.”

And I said, “Big deal.” But there were some like that and absolutely amazing, while we talked about volunteering and all the rest of it, its amazing the number of people who have expressed opinions about what we did wrong in the war, something went wrong in the war, and they had opportunities to go to the war and they chose not to.

You mean when I went back to work. Oh yes, but there were, you see the tax office was manned by youngsters, like myself, eighteen or nineteen, under twenty one

and so they are all very young and they didn’t worry about those sort of things and they laughed off the people who didn’t go. And some people get a bit hurtful with that sort of a situation and some of them encouraged, they make it so they get pilloried a bit

for not having done their share and lots of things would be said, “Why didn’t you join the army? Why didn’t you join the air force?” So eventually it turned around there were people saying to the people who didn’t go, “If I’d known you were short of baked beans, I would have sent some back to you because we had all of them and I didn’t have one”.

But at one stage in Borneo Bay when the war was over and we were stationed there for a while, and for some reason our rations got out of order and all we had were baked beans. If you love baked beans you soon lose it after having baked beans, baked beans on baked beans! No toast!

Well I grew up. That’s the big thing that happened. I think that what it teaches you to do is to get on with your fellow man, to do the right thing and obey, not so much obey orders, but don’t poke your neck into areas you’re not supposed to be. And behave yourself.

And that’s part of discipline and I think that’s what I put it all down to. I got a real good learning about life in the army, and you would with all those South Australian fellows, with their silly songs they sing.

Yes I think it had changed, lots of things had happened during the war that we weren’t aware of. And it was probably the way that so many women have got into the workforce and that was an interesting thing that had happened. One of the important things that happened, I thought. Yes there

was a…and of course we went away as boys and came back as men, you know, it was a complete change. And yeah I was surprised at some of the people who had either not been in service but were talking about how proud he was of the people who

had been in the service. And there were quite a lot of those, people still had those thoughts and Anzac Day still goes on.

Well when they’re singing their hymn, or whatever it is they say, I think of Tommy Graves who was one of our group of NSW fellows who was in the 2/9th

Armoured Regiment, only a little bloke like this, heart of gold and when I close my eyes I can see Tommy Graves. He died four or five years ago.

He came from Goulburn and he was someone who apparently left home early in life and he spent a lot of his time in shearing sheds. And so wherever we had a party, I’m talking about when we had a few beers, when we all got together and had a few beers, lots of people like to sing and Tommy Graves

he’d like to talk about some poetry, The Shearer’s Lament was one of his, typical things about shearers. It goes like this somehow; ‘Where the trees ain’t tall and the gins ain’t small and there’s nothing at all treasures, I was working outback in a wayside shack…’

You can put the rest of it in, and it was about the jumbuck etcetera, etcetera, and it was quite an interesting story, a bit rude. But I always remember Tommy Graves always put that on when we had a few beers. And the memory of the people I’ve met is important to me. I can remember when we were at Wondecla there was a fella named Jimmy Jones and he was only

a little fella, but a tremendous footballer; pretty skinny. And where we had our tents, they put drainage right down the middle, and it was about that wide. Well we had huts built down at the bottom of where our tents were and that was where all the equipment was for the tanks, so we were in one of these huts drinking all this beer that we got and I’d bought some, I had a bit of money,

I’d backed a few winners at the horses and so we had this bit of a piss-up [drinking bout] as well, and when we were ready to go back we couldn't find Jimmy Jones. Couldn't find him anywhere. We searched everywhere. It was pitch dark and someone got a torch and they went up and down this road and there they found him in the drains, wedged sideways down the bottom. He wasn’t very wide and, he wasn’t fat.

It was one of those things that happen. I always remember Jimmy Jones. We had some sort of vocabulary that we could talk to each other. Jimmy would come up to me and say, “G’day, Ron.” Sort of twist his mouth and say, “G’day Ron.” And then he would start talking to me. But you know, camaraderie, which is quite well in the army.

Because you’ve got so many different sorts of people that you’ve never met before and all the Australian fellows who were, who came from South Australia, they had expressions that I had never heard before. They’d often say to me, if I was going somewhere, they’d say, “Where you to?” I didn’t know what they were talking about. “Where you going?”

And lots of other expressions and they used to stick up for their South Australian beer and tell us it was stronger than any other beer, after opening a bottle of Coopers and pouring it and get two glasses and fill them half up with water and fill them up with beer and taste each one of them and tell me which one hasn’t got any water in it. Then they said you get two bottles for one.

It’s hard to say how it had changed, how our ideas probably of some of those areas are a bit different, but we went o Vietnam. That was one of the places I wanted to go and that was amazing, absolutely amazing. Think of what happened there and the people were as same as the Japanese were,

very friendly, no problem at all, nothing was a problem. Their language was the only problem but in some places there a lot of them could speak English or speak French at any rate.

I’m sure it did. It opened up my eyes at Hiroshima.

What we used to call Hiroshima.

World War II should have taught you not to have any more wars.

So whatever you do don’t encourage anyone to go to war unless it’s really necessary, and that’s if there was some foreign country attacking our country. I think we’re going too far supporting other wars in other places, and that’s what I learnt from my period in the army and particularly when I saw Hiroshima.