Australians at War Film Archive

Shenton Park. It was West Subiaco in those days then they changed the name to Shenton Park. I was born in 1920, 19 January.

I started school at the age of six. You had to turn six that year to start school and I went to a primary school in Shenton Park called Rosalie. It was Depression years, no one had any money, the school shop had nobody. I don’t think I had a penny the whole time I went to school.

If you found an empty beer bottle or something like that we’d walk the streets until we found a bottle-o on a horse and cart to sell it for a halfpenny and go and get something from the shop for a halfpenny. None of the boys wore shoes. All the school photographs, the boys are all in bare feet. I went to school, right through school in bare feet.

Well not as bad as some.

My father was a cabinet maker and they were the first hit but he got a job at a funeral director making coffins and in those days they were hand-made solid timber, and French polished, put a lot of work into them. They were just getting past the horse drawn funerals from Perth all the way to Karrakatta. Just imagine how slow that would be.

I remember horses with carts leaving from Fremantle to Perth. There were two horses sometimes with a big dray and he had a reasonable job, but I’d say more than half the kids I went to school with, their fathers were on the dole. They had to go wherever they were sent. They were sent to

places like Busselton and places like that.

Well everyone got a coffin but if you were desperate, what you called a pauper in those days, the government supplied the funeral.

The kids had clothes, you know patches on the patches in some of them. Nothing was wasted. And we were always just that little bit hungry. We weren’t suffering from malnutrition but we were just that little bit hungry. You couldn’t come home from school and help yourself, you had to ask. It would be, “Well go and mow the lawn first,”

or, “Go and water the garden,” or, “Go and chop some wood.”

Yes. We thought nothing of walking. It was round about a mile to school and we’d walk there and back and after school sometimes we’d roam the streets for three or four miles. Just roaming round the streets, having a bit of fun.

Well I suppose it would be a bit different to today but

mostly housewives, a lot of them were English background, a lot of them born in England and they stuck to the old English like stews and roast. Could get a roast and things like that.

I had

three sisters older than me. One was born after me. My mother died when I was born, the next day I think, pneumonia. I was brought up by an aunt for the first four years, my mother’s sister. My father had remarried and I was four before I went back to that home.

My younger sister was born after me, my half-sister.

Yes. I was torn away from a real loving family to a pretty severe stepmother.

I can remember that.

No.

They had it harder than me because my older sister was about ten I think, or twelve, when my mother died. She was born in England and she was brought up in, apparently her mother was a widow early and she was brought up in a situation where it was boarding school where her mother worked. The lady in charge of it was

very, very strict. They used to darn socks in those days if they had holes in their socks. The girls when they were doing their stockings or socks or whatever, they’d do them and she’d get the scissors and cut it out and say, “Do it properly this time,” all that sort of thing. I used to get, my father had a razor strop. A big, wide, you know they used to strop the razors on.

He had four cuts in it, he used to belt me round the legs with that and I used to go to school and show all these welts off on me legs. You know, a pretty tough boy.

It was nothing to be hit across the head with the open hand. My stepmother used to do that when I was fairly young.

She used to whack me. There was an expression round in those days, an old English one, “I’ll box your ears.” It’s a wonder we didn’t finish up all punch drunk.

Very high discipline. Teacher was allowed to cane you and he could give you up to six, three on each hand. It had to be the headmaster.

He used to rock it in as hard as he possibly could. Your hands would swell, big lumps on your hands like that. We wouldn’t go and tell our parents because they’d say, “Well you must have deserved it.”

A lot of it was doing things that we shouldn’t have really done. It’s a bit hard to remember exactly now.

It was nothing for us boys to jump over someone’s back fence and steal fruit. Horse and cart greengrocers, greengrocers that used to come round in a horse and cart. There’d be vacant blocks around with a bit of bush on it and you’d see him go into a house and you’d go and grab something out of his cart, things like that. We’d think nothing of that. But we weren’t vandals. We always went to the football.

It was sixpence to go but the boys always jumped the fence. Even adults would jump the fence in those days. It was a shilling for adults and sixpence for children and they had men inside and outside the football ground stopping people jumping the fence. So we had to beat them. Many a time you got over and the one inside said, “Back you go.” When it got to just before the players come on the ground, if we were inside, they had the dividing fence from the grandstand,

they had commissionaires, one on each fence to stop people from jumping over. They were old soldiers from World War I, they wore a green uniform and we would get as many as we could together and we’d all run across the oval. These two poor old blokes were trying to stop the lot of us. Several times we had a photo in the paper, “Several small boys ran onto the ground.”

Yeah.

Yes it was. All the businesses like the bakers, the vegetables, ice, people had an ice chest if they could afford the ice. They all had horse and carts and we used to play football or cricket right in the middle of the road and never have to get off the road,

or very rarely for traffic. There were very few cars, maybe one in each street and a gravel road. We used to improvise toys. We’d get an old bike wheel from the rubbish tip, just a wheel, take all the spokes out and just have the rim. There’s a groove in the rim and we used to put a stick in it and use that for a hoop. We used to get the [(UNCLEAR)] from a cotton farm

and take all the spikes off it and use it for a cricket bat. We played hockey with a stick we would find in the bush like a small tree stump with a bulb on the bottom and make hockey sticks out of that. We used kerosene tins for goal posts. If we didn’t have a ball we’d use an empty milk tin or a jam tin for a ball. We had a lot of fun.

We always made our own fun. We were about two mile from the river and we used to walk there and back, fishing.

The fish in the river was good, you’d always get fish in the Swan River in those days. And crabs, sometimes we could duck dive after crabs. Just at sundown they used to come out into the shallow water to feed and we could swim and grab them from behind.

We used to get prawns in the river in the day time. In shallow water, the water would only be up to your knees. We’d bend over in that water, we’d have a bag round our neck, a small cloth band round our neck. We’d feel the sand, we could feel the prawns jump, they’d sleep just under the sand. We’d put them in the bag. I’d say you’d get a

half a kilo of prawns in a couple of hours. Now and then we’d eat one alive. Just take the head off and shell it and put it in your mouth while it’s still kicking. I used to like that.

No, never wore gloves. I never wore a hat. I was in the sun all my life and I never got skin cancer till I was seventy

and a lot of that was in the desert.

In the swamp. It wasn’t big enough to be called a lake. Near the school. Round about 1930 they brought the rule in that if it was one hundred degrees Fahrenheit you could go home from school.

A hundred is thirty seven point five I think. It got a lot hotter than that some times. We used to swim in this lake in the nuddy. I learned to swim in the lake. It was all bush all around, beautiful park. All parks all around, all bush. We’d swim in the nuddy.

We used to light fires and cook potatoes. We’d pinch a spud from home and throw it into the coals. It’d come out with all black on the outside. We used to eat that, eat the lot and then if we could scrounge an egg, sometimes we got ducks' eggs out of the lake, and boiled them. We were always looking for something to eat. Then swimming in the river, I learnt to dog paddle in the lake,

it sort of comes natural to you. We used to make canoes out of old rubbish from the rubbish tip. We’d get a piece of timber. A lot of fruit and stuff came in timber cases, wooden boxes. We’d get the timber and put a piece in the front for the bow and the back bit we’d curve it out, cut a piece out for the back of the canoe. We’d nail it on with nails and to seal it. When it was a hot day

they used to use tar on the road. It wasn’t bitumen, it was tar. It used to get a bit soft especially on the edges. On a real hot day, over a hundred you could pick lumps of it up, sort of tear it off, it wouldn’t be sticky, just soft. We’d heat it up in the fire and seal it where we’d nailed the canoe up or any holes in it and there was quite a lot of reeds and the like.

And we used to sink the canoe, hide it somewhere and sink it. We had a lot of fun but it didn’t cost us any money. We were experts at having a lot of fun out of no money at all.

No we used to get away from school. I went to school to put the time in. I hated every day of it. In those days

if you didn’t come up to scratch there was no, he might be a slow learner, special training, none of that, you’d just stay down another year and then pick up again. Luckily I was very small and I got a job when I was about sixteen and I got quite a bit after that but I started work at fourteen. It was quite common for boys and girls to go to work.

You were allowed to leave school at fourteen so I started very young.

No. That was my great grandparents, 1853. They had eight children. His wife was Austrian, they had eight children and only two boys. As far as we know,

we’ve searched everywhere, three sons on the internet, there’s not anyone else with that name come to Australia in all those years. My grandfather was three when he came here. They went to Clare Valley in South Australia. They were Roman Catholic and the Lutherans, they all went to the Barossa about the same time and the Poles didn’t want to go there,

they wanted to go to, they called it Polish Hill in Clare and they had farms there. They were farmers in Prussia and the two boys, one stayed in South Australia and my grandfather came to Western Australia when my father was about thirteen. The only record of our family in the archives

is my grandfather, Herman Frederick Toholka born Germany, it’s got Germany, alien. He applied for the old age pension, he applied for naturalization when he was seventy and he came here when he was three, to get the old age pension.

As far as I know, he didn’t tell me, my stepmother told me, he was told they didn’t want him because he was a German. He was born here and his mother was Scottish. She was born in South Australia too. So I’ve got Scots and Swiss, and Prussian or German, whatever,

for two generations.

I liked nature. I used to love to get out in the bush, animals, I always wanted to be a farmer. My parents told me, “You’re not going to be a farmer. Ten bob [shilling] a week and your tucker’s all you’ll ever make, because they’ve got it pretty hard.”

There’s a book about the district in South Australia where they had the farm and they had it very hard. He told me, “We lived on potatoes and onions and boiled wheat.”

Mmm. I always wanted to be a farmer but

in those days we did what we were told. Sometimes until you’re about twenty-one and adult, you’d still take a lot of notice of what your parents thought. There was no chance of leaving home. There was no way you could do it financially. Nobody wanted to. Some boys ran away from home, you know, if they had a real bad time. They went to work on farms where they were abused, they were slave labour.

Most of them are dead. There’s very few that I went to school with still alive.

Yes they didn’t stay away long. They went to farms where they were told to sleep in a little shed with a little wheat bag or superphosphate bag on the ground,

they could sleep on and in the morning was a brick on the roof to get up before daylight. Throw a rock on the roof as he’s going out from his house to work, things like that. The wife would take morning tea out for the farmer and they’d sit and have it and the boy would have to go away so it didn’t embarrass them, he didn’t get any. That’s some of the stories I heard.

It wasn’t an office boy, I was a messenger boy.

My sister, older sister, was working for a firm called Wirths, was men’s clothing. They had two shops in Perth. My sister was a cashier there. They wanted another boy.

I went for a messenger for a couple of years. Serving behind the counter. It was a job. I was only fourteen and I looked very young. As a matter of fact people used to joke with me when school holidays were coming up if I went with a message somewhere they’d say, “Oh well, won’t see you Monday, school goes back,” and things like that. Because I got pretty cheeky at times too.

I had to ride a push bike around and deliver parcels on a push bike. It was nothing to send me from Perth to Nedlands or Mount Lawley or within reason, not Fremantle or anything. On a push bike it might take me twenty minutes, half an hour to get there and get back just to deliver one parcel.

Men’s clothing. It’s finished now. It’s only a few years ago it’s finished.

They were Polish Jews. They came here about the turn of the century. Very generous, we got a week’s bonus at stock taking time, halfway through the year and double pay at Christmas, bonus pay and I don’t think I ever got a present from my boss from then on, after I left there. I started on twelve [shillings] and sixpence a week.

I had that for twelve months. Every year it went up. In the two years I was there I got up to thirty shillings a week. I started my apprenticeship as a carpenter and joiner, I went back to eleven and sixpence. I was sixteen and I used to smoke as all boys smoked in those days, the normal thing to do, you were grown up if you smoked. I’d say more than ninety per cent

of the boys my age smoked. But the messenger boy in the shop I had all the rackets. The electric light globes I had to change, I got twopence a dozen for them at the shooting gallery. They used to hang them up by on a wire and shoot them with a 22 [calibre] rifle. That shooting gallery was in the middle of William Street near the Wentworth Hotel. And I got men’s shirt boxes. Shirts and pyjamas used to come in a nice box.

There were about a dozen in a box. There was a cafeteria upstairs and one next to us. The one upstairs, Adler Brothers, they were German, they had a very good pastry cook up there. I used to take all the empty boxes to them to put their orders in and I got staleys [stale cakes] from the day before. Shortbread and stuff like that you can eat for a fortnight after. I got threepence for every rat I caught. There was a

bounty on rats in Perth at this time.

Wasn’t a plague, they just had a bounty on them. There’s always been quite a few rats in Perth. And I had to cut the tail off and I used to set the traps. I used to get threepence from petty cash to get a wedge of cheese from the shop and I’d eat half of that and put the rest on the rat trap. When I caught a rat I had to cut the tail off and take it to.

There were underground toilets and you’d go down the stairs and the cleaner down there used to dispose of the tail and write out a chit and the Perth City Council had a beautiful big office in Murray Street and the cash desk was right in the middle. I would march in there with my chit and hand it over to get the threepence and that would buy my lunch.

I had to get the mens’ lunches and the men never ever spent more than threepence on their lunch and a couple of times someone would say, “Oh, I might just have fruit today. Get me a three penny worth of mixed fruit,” you’d get an apple, a banana and an orange or something. There was a young chap working there in the shop. He was a bit cheeky and older than me and he used to take it out on me a bit. You’d start to walk away he’d say, “Three penny worth?” and I’d say, “Not too many watermelons.”

To top it off. This is what I finished up getting the sack for. There was a lady had a little kiosk at the back of the shop. The side of the shop was on a lane going from Hay Street to Murray Street, called Central Lane, I think it’s still there. And there was a little round kiosk in it. This lady, she was a widow, very nice lady,

she had lottery tickets in those days. She sold tickets. You could buy a two and sixpenny ticket and you could buy a quarter share for nine pence. Tear a quarter of it off, or half of it off. Tickets were two and six and I used to take all the butts back to the lottery office in the terrace and get the new books, and all her posting and all her messages on the side.

To go from that to eleven and sixpence a week for six months as an apprentice. Had to survive without money.

Someone put me in. She asked me one day, she said, “Do you reckon you can get me a couple of bottles of beer, Fred?” The age was twenty one. I didn’t even look fourteen so I said to one of the chaps,

he was coming back from lunch, standing outside to go back in, “What about going over and getting a couple of bottles of beer for Mrs. Llewellyn?” He said, “No, no I won’t,” and he put me in so I got the sack. It didn’t worry me because I was the age I had to go and start serving. I didn’t mind. I wanted a job I could get my hands dirty. I wasn’t sorry when I got the sack.

No, I was an apprentice carpenter. I started an apprenticeship as a carpenter.

No, when I was a messenger boy in the shop. Then, there were no rackets there, I had to work hard as a carpenter joiner.

Well a carpenter and joiner, a carpenter does the outside work and the joiner makes all the door frames, window frames, staircases and all that in the factory because you couldn’t do them out on the job. You had to know both so we went to the tech college one day a fortnight, all the apprentices went.

The outside boys learnt joinery and we learnt carpentry. I was still an apprentice when the world war broke out. I was seventeen, I joined the militia. We used to have weekend camps, same as army reserve now, weekend camps and things like that and night parades and the money was good and it was twice as much as I would have got at work.

We used to do one six day camp every year we took the horses and all from Perth to Rockingham, Karrakatta to Rockingham. Every fortnight we had a night parade.

Well sometimes we’d harness the horses up, have a bit of a ride around until we were told to bugger off again.

You might do gunnery. Drivers had to be gunners too, they had to be the lot. Then we did about six weekend camps and the money was twice as much as I was getting at work. The boys that had government jobs were lucky because the government paid their wages too. I asked my bosses and they said, “You get paid by the army.” I said, “Yeah, and a lot more than you pay.”

They were a pretty miserable firm. They were a very big firm, head office in London. They built the Busselton Jetty, export all that jarrah to England. I was the first apprentice to enlist and there wasn’t too many [(UNCLEAR)] either. Our week finished on the Friday night and I had to go into the army on the Friday morning. Friday the thirteenth to go fight a war

and they docked me a day’s pay because I didn’t put the full week in. When I was away someone would pull a wallet out and say, “The firm gave me this with a five pound note in it when I enlisted,” or this watch, it’s engraved, “The firm gave it to me when I enlisted.” They wouldn’t believe me when I said, “Well, they docked me a day’s pay.”

I was interested in horses. It was a toss up whether I joined the naval reserve. It wasn’t for the money really but it was just more or less the horses.

Mmm.

Well they had to pull the gun and the gun limber and there’s a lot of harness with long traces. There six horses for one gun, three riders, one to lead, one at the centre and one at the back and all that equipment. You had to know the names for all that, the army had names for everything. You had to learn the names of all that equipment and we had to do gunnery as well.

Guns and ammunition.

Well they’re a field gun. They fired a twenty-five [pound] field shell.

Oh yes. There’s photos of it there.

When I did enlist we were in the militia camp and it’s a long story but it took me a fortnight to get my father’s permission and then I finished up putting my age on the record, “born 1919” because the first lot of applications I put in got lost somewhere. When I went along doing it again I wasn’t going to run around looking for my father and getting his signature.

I knew he’d already given me permission so I just put my age up.

I think it was the horses. The boys, none of my friends.

It was a very smart uniform. It was

khaki riding breeches, black boots, black leggings, leather leggings, chrome plated spurs that used to jingle, we used to make them jingle and a blue tunic, leather bandoliers, there’s photos of it there,

leather bandoliers and other bits of colouring on the tunic, piping and we had a hat with it, a blue pugaree on the hat, a hat band with red in it, gold buttons and badges. A very smart uniform.

Oh yes.

Well there was regulation but it was nice to put it on if you were going somewhere. You only wore it when it was official, things like that. It was very nice to just stand on the street corner and give the girls a treat, let them look at you.

Oh yes.

Well I joined at seventeen and the war didn’t start until I was nineteen, I was nearly twenty when it started.

What was the question?

Yes.

And fire off ammunition. They’re digging up some of the shells we fired in Rockingham now. One of our camps was at Rockingham, one was at Northam. On the weekends we used to do it at Karrakatta, opposite the cemetery there.

There was a big army base there.

Yes, but we did live shoots when we had the annual camp.

There was permanent men, most of them were World War I soldiers that joined the permanent army. They had what they call a regular army now. Mostly old soldiers.

And the beauty of it, by the time you finished the cadets, when you were eighteen you went into the militia you could drink in the wet canteen and the age at hotels was twenty one, so that was another attraction, a bit of grog.

That’s right. Well, I was the only

son and I had a sister died when I was eighteen. That would have been a factor too. It took me two weeks to get him. He discussed it with his friends. They must have said, “Let him go. He’s got six months to go and he can go anyhow.” So he decided to sign the papers.

I put them in, the first lot went astray and in that time Italy came into the war. Of course they came in droves, especially from Kalgoorlie.

They had places where you could go and recruit.

That’s when I changed my age.

And the five blokes that went in with me on that day, all out of the militia, I’m the only one left but I wasn’t the youngest.

Some boys look a lot older for their age and some look younger. Boys that are big and usually dark eyes and very blonde.

Being young and I didn’t have to shave much. I still haven’t got a very strong beard. I could get away with shaving, you were supposed to shave every morning, but I could get away with shaving twice a week. I always go without shaving overnight, which I wasn’t supposed to do.

We went into Clairmont Showground. They took that over, the whole place, used all the buildings and grounds. They used to go there for a few days then you went by train, the Northam camp was the main camp. I went in, they had preferences. I put “Preference: artillery” because I’d done all that training. We went in as general whatever you want to be,

when it came round to, “You five blokes can all go up to Narrogin with artillery,” we decided to stay in the infantry because we got used to the blokes we joined up with. And we said, “No,” and I remember, one of my old friends, I just met him a couple of weeks ago after all those years. I remember him saying to me, “You’re a fool. There’s no one here

in this big canteen who wouldn’t like to be in the artillery.” It’s hard work, the artillery. He went to 2/4th [Battalion] machine gunner with the Western Australian. He went to Singapore. They were prisoners of war all that time.

No, I did go, after that. I changed over in the middle.

What do you mean?

I don’t understand, you just go along, put an application in and they call you up. Do you mean the reason?

It was a combination of a spirit of adventure, I’d never traveled any further than Perth to Busselton which is about a hundred and fifty mile. A lot of people my age, especially my parents, they wouldn’t have gone that far in their lives. A spirit of adventure and liking the service life that I’d had and

I think it was my duty.

I was twenty.

Well you had to be twenty one without your parent’s consent you could enlist at twenty. Twenty to thirty-five. Some of the men would have been up to fifty that got away with it.

A lot of boys seventeen, I’ve heard. We had twin brothers in our unit, seventeen. They turned seventeen and they were killed on their seventeenth birthday.

Well they didn’t check on criminal records like they do now or anything like that. As long as you passed the medical.

Up to twenty-one and I got my father’s permission.

After about a fortnight of talking.

Well I don’t think I did. He knew I wanted to go and he just discussed it with his friends. I suppose most of them said, “Well let him go, because in six months he can go anyhow.” I told him that.

We did obey our parents in those days. There was a lot of difference in the discipline that we had to children today, young people today.

We did train at Northam, yes.

We went by troop train from Karrakatta to Northam.

That’s around about sixty mile. Old steam train.

Yes a lot of young fellas.

Oh you know, excitement mainly. Something new.

Well I’d been there before in the militia camp. It was

mostly excitement. Everyone was, they used to like gambling, I wasn’t much of a gambler, but two up was always played, and it was illegal. I used to get into the showers and there’d be hessian screens around the showers and they’d have a hurricane net and you could see, they didn’t go right to the ground and you could see all these boots and you could hear all this, “Keep it down, keep it down,” and, “Two bob on heads.”

Then housey, bingo was called housey in those days, that was allowed. A lot of that went on too, especially on troop ships. Everywhere you went you’d hear them calling out numbers.

Well the usual foot soldier, infantry training.

We had rifles, bayonets, we had rifle firing, light machine guns, we used quite a lot of rounds on the range. The hand grenades and all that sort of thing.

They were World War I 303 rifles. Some of them were stamped 1916, ’17, 18.

They did make a lot of new rifles in Australia, but we had the old World War I ones.

Oh, they were a good rifle but there was nothing like automatic in those days, you didn’t have automatic rifles. Worked the bolt every round you fired and I think there was nine in a magazine and you had to change the magazine. The bayonets were, I think they were about

eighteen inches long. We fixed the bayonet to the rifle.

Yes.

We used to have bags hanging filled with sand and straw and that hanging up on a frame. You went in and charged into it. I think everyone thought, “I hope I never have to use this.”

They were the old Vickers, water cooled. A machine gun has to be cooled. You had a can of water, hose running up into it. Most of our weapons were World War I. The hand grenades were the same. The Bren gun

was a big improvement. They used the Vickers right to the end of the war because they were a medium machine gun. The Bren was a light, it was very accurate and it wasn’t that much heavier than a rifle.

Mainly route marches. We had a lot of gas training.

We carried gas respirators right till the last landing, the end of the war, the last landing we threw them all away. It was pretty obvious that we wouldn’t have gas. We had to train in gas masks at times.

We had to do bayonet training, running and marching. The first route march they took us out on the Northam camp we did twenty six mile

on a bitumen road.

A few sore feet but some of them said, “We’re going to the dance tonight.”

In Northam, the town, the camp was three miles out and they used to run buses out there but quite often we used to walk in and walk home again.

Not very often. We had leave once a fortnight

to come down to Perth or go home, where ever you came, Kalgoorlie, Albany, or wherever on the train. Goods trains to all those towns, even the country towns in those days. Down to Albany, Esperence they all had railway lines.

They were timber, timber floors and corrugated iron sides and roof.

All new buildings. It was all tents before that, we never had buildings in the militia days, we had all tents. Timber floors and shutters to open up the windows. I think we slept about thirty in each hut laying on the floor with a palliasse, a bag of straw.

Well we didn’t expect it to be easy. We had cold showers. It’s pretty cold in Northam in winter. We expected to have it rough. We had some old boilers there and they used to light a fire under them for hot water in the morning for shaving. I didn’t have a very strong beard and I only had to shave every couple of weeks,

about twice a week, but I thought, “I’m never going to use hot water to shave because there’s going to be times when you’re not going to get it,” and I was right too. I didn’t want to get used to using hot water for a shave.

It was about nine months

because there was quite a few in front of us to go. There used to be so many went in a convoy and we were the last port here. They come from New Zealand, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. The ships were that big they couldn’t get into Fremantle Harbour. We had the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth, Aquitania, Ile de France, the biggest ships in the world. They used to anchor

out of Fremantle. Like you see the container ships there now anchored out waiting to come in. We had to go out on smaller craft. Once you went out there you waited till you sailed, you didn’t get back. We met the Queen Mary before daylight in a small tanker taking fuel out. When we got there all the sailors' heads were sticking out,

it was starting to get daylight. All the insults in the world were going on, good natured mudslinging, different states. They were showering us with cigarettes because cigarettes were that cheap on the boat because there was no customs on it and beer was cheap because there was no customs on that. They were showering us with cigarettes and then they let us go on board and we would say,

“You’re going quiet now, we’re coming up. We’ll get at ya.” There was about six thousand of them and one thousand of us. Later on, it was a good trip because the Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary were new ships and they hadn’t been stripped right down, they still had artwork, a beautiful big dining room and swimming pool and all the furniture and that. Later in the war they stripped it right down and

they put twelve thousand on it, at different stages in the war. We had a very good trip, the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. For a boy that had never been past [(UNCLEAR)], in a few weeks I was eight thousand miles away.

Yes, I like the sea.

It was very hot because it was September.

Especially when we got up into the Red Sea. We went to Ceylon which is Sri Lanka now. We didn’t stay at Colombo we stayed at Trincomalee. It’s a beautiful island, a natural harbour bigger than Sydney on the other side from Colombo. It’s been a British naval base for hundreds of years, even mentioned now, Trincomalee. That was the first foreign soil I saw. As we were coming in off the ship

I was looking up and I thought, “This is amazing. It’s like going to the moon. I’m looking at another part of the world that I never thought I’d ever see.”

Of course when we went into the Red Sea and went into Suez Canal, the entrance to Suez Canal, Port Tewfik, different all together. The Arabs were on the boats coming out

wanting to sell things to us. It wasn’t long before we picked up a bit of Arabic, the language.

All sorts of things. A lot of it was food. They used to sell boiled eggs, even little boys on railway stations and that, they used to yell out,

“Eggs are cooked, tomato rolls.” And things like that. You could get all sorts of things.

It was a novelty for us and we were amused by the shoeshine boys. They’d sneak up behind you and slap a bit of mud on the front of your boot from behind on a stick,

then say, “I’ll shoe shine.” You thought, “I’ll get even with this little bugger I’ll make him clean it and I won’t pay,” and he’d follow you along with his box on his shoulder and tears rolling down his cheeks and everyone would know what you’d done, so you’d finish up paying him. They could jump on and off a tram. The trams in Cairo, I reckon they would to do fifty mile an hour,

and these paper boys could run and jump on that tram while it was going and off again. They’d go through the tram flat out. By the time you had a good look at the paper it’d be a fortnight old or something.

We had lectures and we had boat drill

and we had sporting events. We had boxing. The deck of the Queen Mary was the size of an Australian Rules football oval. Three laps to the mile. We had long distance races. We used to have to get out of the way and they’d climb up on things and all that. There was plenty of room on it really.

They used to give us lectures on what it would be like when we got there. How to treat the natives and all that.

Oh yes.

Oh yes. There used to be a few smart-alec remarks and that.

Very good.

It’s a bit hard to remember it now. I can say the food was very good. They had all the facilities on the boat, they had refrigerators, kitchens and everything, galleys. Couldn’t complain about the food.

Main dining room, enormous.

As big as a great big ballroom it was.

I wouldn’t know really but it was an awful lot. A lot of volunteers volunteered to work the whole trip as stewards, bringing the food out to you. You just sat there like passengers used to.

Yes

but it wasn’t as much as coming home because the Japanese weren’t in the war then, it was 1941. The Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth were that fast they reckon that it used to take seven minutes to sight up a torpedo on a submarine in those days. They used to change course about every five minutes, so they’re not being lined up by submarines.

They’d loved to have got them, the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth.

We had the HMAS Hobart, Australian cruiser took us from Fremantle and that was sunk in that area by the Japs about a year after that. A British cruiser took us from Trincomalee

and that was sunk just after the Japs came into the war up in that area. The Germans wouldn’t have had anything that close to Australia in those days. When the Sydney was sunk here that was the year after that, that German raider. But coming home there was submarines, yes.

I would say I suppose there would have been some. Never worried me. The biggest problem with the Queen Mary was getting lost.

Yes. A couple of times it was meal times, I was starting to panic and you’d go up an alleyway or something and it’s the wrong one, you finish up, you don’t know where you are.

Oh yes. We always had plenty of mates.

Even right from day one. We had our special mates.

Not exactly on board but the whole time we were close together.

Not really, no. It was just a pleasant trip.

We were headed to the Middle East. We went to Port Tewfik on the Canal. We went by train then through to Gaza where all the fighting’s going on now. We were camped at Gaza, our first camp.

New Gazi.

Just tents and a couple of little huts you know, your canteen or something. They had native labour. Even the canteen was a couple of young natives. The Jews and the Arabs had a truce in the World War; they tried not to fight each other. We were very safe there. Some of the Arabs would try to steal.

I was in the infantry there, when we arrived there and we had to take the bolt out of our rifle and keep it in your pocket at night and the rifles were chained to the tent post. A chain through the trigger guard and a padlock on it. Most of them used to use their kitbags for a pillow and they were known to come up outside the tent, slit that bag from one end to the other

and take stuff out of it while you were asleep, without waking you up. So when we were on guard at night you’d just let a round go every now and then in the air just to let them know we’re there.

On the ground, we had a palliasse. We had a palliasse of straw most of the time. If we were out on trains or been into action we just slept

on the ground.

In tents for a while. It was much the same climate in Israel, was Palestine in those days, was much the same climate as Australia. They grow the same things. Even had gum trees there that had been imported there, round the cemeteries from World War I. We saw all those cemeteries. All being well kept.

A few weeks. That was the stage were we transferred to the artillery. It was an infantry camp. Australia 9th Division were in Tobruk and we were reinforcements for them. They were sending them up. There was a siege at Tobruk. The only way they could get

men out and reinforcements up there and food and ammunition was by destroyers which were the very small navy ships and they were all World War I, and there was about six Australian navy destroyers all lost on the Tobruk run. They used to go from Alexandria to Tobruk and they couldn’t do it and get back in darkness. They had to make one trip in the daylight

and that was when they used to be bombed all the way. We were just about getting close to going to Tobruk and they came around and they decided to increase the artillery. The regiment used to have two batteries. Eight guns in a battery. They decided to make them three and they wanted people who had artillery experience. We had a lot of mates in the unit we could go to

so that’s when we decided to join up. We decided to go and have a look, go to this meeting place where they were going to pick us out and we all decided, because there was quite a few of us, to go over to the artillery. They came around, asked us, they took other men that hadn’t been in the artillery that were drivers and signallers.

We went to another camp just a couple of mile away, an artillery training camp and from there we went to, we were very lucky because the regiment we joined had a three months with the British School of Artillery in Cairo, which was a permanent camp.

The British Army had been there for over a hundred years in Cairo. It was a beautiful camp. Just a tram ride outside Cairo, a place call Heliopolis. It was more or less training for officers. We were gunners. We fired our guns and any day we weren’t doing anything it was open camp.

It would only have been three or four weeks.

Yes we had field guns and they were very old, they would have been World War I and we used to go out into the Sinai desert, near Beersheba, where the Light Horse fought in World War I. There were still traces of barbed wire there

from World War I, rusted away. We used to do our shoots there in the desert. The Sinai Desert is all rocks everywhere, stones. You could see the grain of the timber in these stones, petrified wood.

It was. And Beersheba was an Arab village, just had one street. We used to go through and they’d all be sitting there

with their hubbly bubbly pipes [hookahs]. A pipe where the smoke goes through the water. Just looking at us and I used to wonder what they’re thinking. They didn’t care whether the Germans were there or we were there.

Not really, no.

I can’t remember the names now but it was on the Mediterranean. We were pretty close to the coast.

The Gaza, pretty close to the coast too. It wasn’t far from Gaza.

It was interesting, I mean to see the places where they’d been, where they’d camped, the cemeteries. We used to read the names and that on the cemeteries, graves. They used to tell us.

The natives, the older ones. Especially in Cairo. One old chap in Cairo I spoke to. There’s always people in most countries who can speak English. They used to teach us a bit of Arabic because the Egyptians speak Arabic, they haven’t got a language of their own. And he told me, “Oh, Australians, New Zealanders, they wrecked Cairo in the last war.”

We didn’t do a bad job of carrying it on.

Oh we were only young. You couldn’t say we were hardened drinkers. We used to have a few beers and we’d go a bit silly. They had nightclubs there. We’d never heard of a nightclub in Australia then.

You could get canned beer. They were very rough nightclubs. All the troops there, there was Australians, New Zealanders, all the British troops, there was South Africans, there was Free French, Poles, Greeks. People that had escaped their own country and formed a force of their own. There was a lot of fights.

The way the young ones carry on when they get drunk. They’d go to the nightclubs and get cans of beer there. It was the first time we’d tasted canned beer and it tasted like tin. They didn’t have these cans. We’d roll the cans in amongst where they were dancing and things like that. You might tip the tables over when you’re going out or something like that, just to make a nuisance of yourself. That was only when we got drunk.

Yeah it was, with all those troops.

No that was in Alexandria. And don’t ask me how I know.

No Cairo was the Burqas. That was the name of the street, Sha El Burqa. That was the one in Cairo.

Well it was controlled by the forces. I think most of them were.

Well we had to shoot at targets. Artillery shooting,

it’s mostly indirect. You don’t see what you’re shooting at. The officers doing the shoot, they send a signal back with the signallers, different angles and that on the gun, how to load the gun and give orders how many rounds gun fire and that sort of thing. They range on the target until they were on it.

One gun ranges so you don’t waste your ammunition and then the four or eight all come in on the same, they’d be going through the same directions on the dial, the different instruments you’ve got. Every gun’s the same, so when you get onto the target they open up all the guns. They fire a round or whatever, two rounds.

They used to have,

roughly about six.

We all had to be trained. Even the officers controlling

all had to have their training. They would be out in front and we had a field telephone with a single wire with an earth pin which wasn’t that good. And a radio that had about five mile

range, which was easily jammed which they did. They relied mainly in action on the earth pin and lying it on the ground. Just laying on the ground trucks could run over it, tanks could go over it and enemy fire could hit it.

There was a signaller at the gun position and a signaller at the observation post and the maintenance crew had to keep the line going. He had to run along the line holding it until he got to the break and join it and run back again. Sometimes they’d be halfway there and they’d make it a bit shorter. They used to say, “Can you hear me, can you hear me? I hear you strength five,” or, “four,” from zero to ten.

We had an officer once, he was one of the boys, a real good bloke. He had a very loud voice and he had a name before the war where he worked as a loud voice, actually it was ‘Clapper’. This day we were in the desert

and it was when we were in action. It was one of those days when there wasn’t much doing, a bit of a lull and he was going, “Can you hear me, can you hear me?” and the maintenance signaller, he poked into the line, because they could do that, and he said, “Yes, but not over the phone.”

Posted to a unit. As soon as we left the infantry we were posted to the unit that we stayed with.

The camp just outside Cairo where we were doing the training for the British Army.

El Maza. That’s the airport in Cairo now. The air force had a base there too. It’s a very old city, Heliopolis. Trams used to go into Cairo.

From there we joined the regiment that we stayed with.

About three months.

No, we were in the regiment when we went there.

They did all this.

It was much the same for us, it was what we already knew because we were gunners, firing the guns. It was for the officers doing the shoots. Actually we didn’t learn much really because we knew what we were doing.

Well,

they were probably young officers without the experience. Hadn’t been there long.

We had a good lot of officers. I couldn’t complain really.

No.

They were very good. We were in tents. We had a big marquee, mess tent to eat and the kitchens were close to them and they were a weatherboard building, timber ply building.

Cooking was done with solid fuel stoves and we got a hydro burner. It was a compressed air cylinder with fuel in it and it used to blow the fuel in

under the stove because there wasn’t much firewood in those countries.

It was very much like Australian conditions, it was hot in the summer and wet and cold in the winter.

While we were there it was summer time. It was quite nice.

We did.

It was desert sort of thing. The tram line end and the city finished and it was desert from there on.

We didn’t go in there much at all, we used to go into Cairo. It was only a tram ride out. It would have been I’d say about twenty minutes on the tram.

It was mostly

residences. Big blocks of flats. The usual shops and that. It wasn’t like a big shopping centre, it was more residential.

Whenever you were off duty you could go in. I went in many times. Sometimes we had two or three days. While we were there I went over the Sphinx and the pyramids and the Nile, the houseboats on the Nile,

the zoo. Climbed up the big pyramid. Just outside Cairo at Giza and the Sphinx was there. Went right down underneath the Sphinx to a tomb. A big stone coffin with the slab pulled back and a few bones in it. I climbed right up that big

pyramid. It looks smooth in the photos but there’s gaps, you can pull yourself up each stone. A stone averaged about two and a half tonne each. You could sit on the edge of it. You look at a photo from a distance it looks like it’s smooth and people say, “How do you climb that?” with a bit of effort, you had to pull yourself up each stone. It was about chest high, standing on the bottom to the next.

And I went inside it and there was nothing much to see. It had all been broken into and robbed hundreds of years ago. They were supposed to be five thousand years old then. And the quarry’s a long way away where they bought all the stone and they reckon they just worked like ants, all these slaves pulling these stones, sliding along on something like a sled. To build them to get up that high

they must have banked the sand up and slid them up like that. On all those pyramids, each corner is dead spot on north, south, east or west.

Yes. It did.

Well, a lot of the leave out was a pretty fair system.

There was quite a lot because you could go months and months without being able to get anything to drink,so when it was there we made the best of it.

We had a camp, it was only a couple of hundred metres from the edge of Heliopolis and the tram went to there.

No. Only when we weren’t on duty.

We had other duties as well as training, guard duties and things like that.

It means you’re excused until you’re due to go on duty again. It might be the next morning at six o’clock and you’d come back that night or it might be in two days time, you’d make sure you were there.

Yes.

The British, yes.

Not really but in the camp they had a big canteen, a NAAFI [Navy Army Air Force Institute] – it was run by a private company –

for British Forces. They supplied all the canteen, even Australian beer, we got Australian beer there for quite a reasonable prices. We were on, the lowest paid Australian was about six and sixpence a day, that’s seven days a week and they were getting around two and sixpence. The British pound was twenty five shillings in our money so there wasn’t much difference in the exchange.

The Egyptian pound was on par with it. If we drew an Egyptian pound it was twenty five shillings in our pay book.

Quite a bit but only really at that time, the rest of the time you weren’t really that close. You might have been in the same area but you weren’t actually with them.

Yes.

Well, a lot of them were conscripts. There was a regular British Army units that were permanent soldiers and there was the conscripts. It was only natural in a country that had to supply so many. There was no conscription in Australia so,

I remember one night over there, we used to call them the ‘chooms’ because they called each other chum. He said, “Is that right, you Aussies are all volunteers?” “Yeah, that’s right,” and he said, “Well you must have had a bastard of a home life.”

They were good soldiers. Only naturally, we thought they weren’t as good as us, I think the New Zealanders didn’t like them as much as we did. We were never actually that,

well we were in battle but we were in different areas. We had to rely on them at times and they had to rely on us.

Well, dust storms. We were pretty lucky

in that training in the Sinai, we never had a great lot of weather problems.

We had reasonable rations. It was mostly tinned food.

Water was rationed, especially when we went to the Western Desert, when we were fighting. I used to have my morning wash

in a two ounce tobacco tin with a shaving brush. Do the eyes and ears. We shaved our hair off in the desert, we’d rub the sand out of that. We couldn’t wash our clothes so we used to dip them in petrol. There was always plenty of petrol. We used to cook with petrol. Throw a tin of petrol into the sand and boil the billy over the petrol burning in the sand. If it wasn’t quite boiling and the petrol was going out you’d throw a bit more in.

But we were lucky, I’ll go onto that later.

Syria and Lebanon.

Because it was a French possession

and the French had just surrendered to Germany and they had the famous French Foreign Legion in the Middle East. Toughest army in the world. The Australian 7th Division was sent into there to take the country off them. Very fierce fighting while it lasted. A West Australian, Jim Gordon got a VC [Victoria Cross], and Roden Cutler.

Well we could see the 7th Division coming home. They were coming back to go to Port Tewfik to come back to Australia because the Japs had entered the war. While we were at Cairo the Japs came into the war and the 7th Division and the 6th were coming home but we were left there.

Our Prime Minister had an agreement with Churchill that two divisions would come home and one would stay. We had to go up there, right up to the Turkish border through Syria and Lebanon, Lebanon and then Syria to a place called Aleppo.

Australians were there in World War I too. It was right on the Turkish border and they thought the Turks would either come into the war against us or Germany would come down through Turkey and take the Middle East from there as well as from the desert the other end. We were sent up there to defend the borders there and we were digging in

and reinforcing defences there.

We went by road. It’s a long way. It was our first time we’d seen snow most of us. Mountain villages. Lebanon is a beautiful country. All the snow on the mountains, even in the summer. People used to go skiing up there in the summer. Most of the hills are all terraced with olive groves.

Everything was lovely and green. You’re right on the edge of the Mediterranean. The road went along, you could see the coast all the way. It was cold.

Well we had winter clothes, we always had winter clothes and when we were going into the desert the winter clothes used to go into a store, went into the kit store. We had our greatcoats

and winter clothes. Although it was cold we were well equipped for it.

It was a Foreign Legion barracks. Stone buildings. There was all rocks just laid on the ground to walk on because the snow was melting and there was mud everywhere.

We used to walk on these rocks. It was all the, the Foreign Legion were a lot of French and a lot of German. Anyone could join the Foreign Legion, murderers and anyone trying to get away from the police went into the Foreign Legion. That’s very well why it lasted, they were cut right off from all supplies. Ones that volunteered

to join the Free French forces they let them. The Free French fought with us.

No, they’d been taken prisoner. Some of them that wanted to stay were because they volunteered to fight with the Free French.

They didn’t avoid capture. They were interrogated and told they could fight with the Free French if they wanted to.

I suppose the British Army.

They were avoiding going to prison camps.

There was a lot of open warfare there in the hills. They were very well equipped. Sir Roden Cutler who was a Governor General of Australia [actually Governor of New South Wales] lost his leg there.

He got a Victoria Cross there. He was an artillery man too.

Well the one we were in would have housed about eight or nine hundred.

We had everything there, there was kitchens

and mess huts.

Yes. There was a lot of drawings on the wall.

Some blokes fancy themselves as artists and that, the hills of home and places like that and writing in foreign languages.

They were more or less towns. Anything that anyone that fancied himself as an artist would do.

No.

It was much the same. We were mostly on tinned food. We did get fresh meat. We used to say, “That’s more like camel. That’s more like horse.”

Yes.

Well it’s a lot different to tents, although tents are pretty comfortable. A tent was a luxury.

We were only there for about six weeks and they decided to

go back to Tripoli. There’s a Tripoli in Lebanon and a Tripoli in Libya. They’re both on the Mediterranean and we went there. It’s mountainous country and only a narrow coastal strip. It was better to defend it there and let the top part go.

Yes, Lebanon. Let Syria go and stop them there.

So when we went there it was very pleasant. There was water running down from the snow in the mountains. It was getting on towards summer. Nice clean water there. We were very welcome with the locals because they were short of food, short of clothes and

they used to come and work for us. We even had laborers doing heavy work. We might get fifty laborers and a quarter of them would be women, the donkeys would carry sand and stuff on the donkeys. They got employment that way. They used to get a lot of food because some of our chaps used to flog off a tin of jam or a pound of butter or something and give it to these girls that used to come and do our washing.

They used to come and take our washing away and bring it back all nice, folded up.

By convoy. Our own vehicles.

Don’t remember now but it wasn’t that long a trip. It might have been two or three days. We slept alongside our vehicles. We’d pull up and sleep on the ground.

When we got into the camps, yes.

Yes.

It was tents. There was a gully ran right through the middle and we used to have to go up and down over that to go to other parts of it, to go to the kitchen and places like that, or the mess.

It was a beautiful place. All around all you could see was olive groves, nice green lawns and snow on the mountains and cedars. This place in the mountains was where all the wealthy tourists used to go for skiing.

More or less digging in and

making defences to stop them coming down.

Well we dug into the side. There was a mountain range going down so we dug into the side of there for gun positions using concrete and that to build defences. We made a big tank trap. That’s like a big pit that stops tanks getting across.

And just did our work and then, we were there for quite a while. I can’t remember the actual time now. It could have been five or six months and then we were called out to go up to Alamein.

No, it was very peaceful.

We were just doing a normal day’s work, work all day. We might have one day off a week and have football matches, things like that.

Football, yes.

You could but there was only little villages and things. You could see for miles from that camp and all the little villages were the same.

We were very popular with the locals

because the kids used to come along around meal time and get all the left overs. The first thing I noticed was, we used to have a lot of hand knitted socks. They used to knit them in Australia, you know, socks for soldiers, comfort funds and things, hand knitted socks. We noticed they were pulling them out of the rubbish bin when they were worn out.

We asked them what they were doing. There was always a few who could speak English and they spoke French there too. Why they wanted those old socks with holes in and they would take them to pieces and get the wool out of them so there was no more socks thrown out after that. It was, “Do my washing and I’ll get you a couple of pairs of socks.” Even the new ones used to go.

Well we got them from Australia and we used to get them from Rhodesia. They used to be branded ‘Friends of the Anzacs, Rhodesia’. That was a British country in those days.

Yes.

Yes we got several.

We used to get the Camp Comfort Fund of Australia parcels.

There would have been a difference. The South African ones, we used to get a lot of tobacco, cigarettes, very good tobacco from South Africa. You’d get things like socks and

you might get soap. Sometimes the tinned food, we used that. Quite a few parents used to send a cake, a fruit cake over. They’d put it in a tin and tie it up in a cloth, sew it up. It used to be quite good when someone got them. It might take months but fruit cake will keep.

Mmm.

Mail wasn’t very regular. We were a long while without mail in Syria and when it did come it was all watermarked and some was partly burnt. It was mail that was going to the Middle East it was

damaged in the raid. When they raided Broome, I don’t now why but our mail was there. One of those, they used to call them flying boats, that’s an aeroplane with floats on it and they shot them up in Broome, the Japs. Apparently some of our mail was there and some of it was damaged. We hadn’t had any mail for quite a while but we got fairly good. It used to come by Asia, sea mail.

Very little air mail.

Yes we had a Christmas in Cairo.

Well in the morning we got coffee with rum in it, served by the officers. All through the army the officers served at Christmas dinner then they went and had their own.

It was very good food. I don’t remember exactly what we had now. The next Christmas we had back in Palestine, Gaza.

Well I had six.

Not exactly, no. I was in Northam camp.

I was nearly twenty one and I had one in Cairo, one in Gaza and the next in Queensland, up in north Queensland.

I had two in Queensland and one in Sydney on the way home. West Australians couldn’t get home after the war, we were stuck in Sydney.

Yes. A German submarine

shelled one of the industrial areas just outside Tripoli and we were taken down there. As well as explosive ammunition we had armour piercing that’d go to shooting at tanks. We went down there to, if there were any more sightings of subs to have a go at them

but they didn’t site any more. They just fired a few shells into this industrial area and disappeared. That’s the one thing I can think of.

Well mainly, we weren’t just sitting around doing nothing, we were working. All the time we were in

Tripoli there we were doing digging. A lot of it was pick and shovel work. I remember one thing there, there was a silk worm factory and they had all these silk worms. All kids had silk worms when we were young. We used to wind it up on a bit of cardboard so we could get the silk and tie it in a bow. They had, very primitive, they had

pulleys with a shaft just turning and these girls, they had a trough underneath it and these cocoons were put in water and these girls were picking them up, starting the thread like we used to and just turning it onto this shaft and it would wind itself off.. They used to get the silk that way.

It was about

a couple of hours’ travel by road, by truck.

We used to go when we were getting ready to go out and do the defences, the villagers would all come around having a look at us and talking to us and it was right there.

Yes, we got to know them pretty well.

No. If we stayed in towns over there it was usually one of the clubs. They all had clubs like the New Zealanders, we all had clubs. Some of those clubs were hotels they’d taken over.

Well the ones in Cairo they were as big as hotels in Perth.

Pretty wild. They used to serve beer in bottles, you’d drag it out of the bottle.

Well I know when we used to go to the New Zealand club. We were very popular with New Zealanders. We always got on well with New Zealanders. They liked us, especially the Maoris. The Maoris used to, the big round tables, you’d sit about eight people around these tables,

they wouldn’t buy a couple of bottles each, they would just cover their table in bottles. Getting towards the end of the night, they knew they wouldn’t be able to drink it all so they’d be looking for some Australians to join them. “Come over here with us.”

Yes. We were very close to the New Zealanders.

I think so.

Very wild men. They were very good soldiers.

No not really, just young men letting their hair down.

Well, noise, singing.

Varying noises.

Oh, there was a lot of songs, I know, “She’ll be going round the mountain when she comes,” just come out then. Everywhere we went in Cairo the Egyptians were playing that especially in their nightclubs. “We’ll kill the old red rooster when she comes,” that’s in that song.

There was one,

“We were sailing along on moonlight bay,” I’ve heard it a couple of times lately, “We were sailing along the moonlight bay, I heard the voices calling ‘Don’t go away’,” you remember that one. That came out then. As soon as a song came out everyone was on to it. In those days everyone went round singing or whistling, even at city life at work, all the men used to go singing or whistling all the time.

You never hear that much now.

With the natives?

They were a lot different to us. There used to be guides used to travel,

take us around, places like that, they’d charge us. When I was in Jerusalem, I went and had leave in Jerusalem, I went to look at the big churches over there and the Wailing Wall, and Bethlehem.

I spent my twenty-first here at Northam camp.

My twenty-second in Cairo. The first leave I had was Tel Aviv and Jaffa, the Arab village next to Tel Aviv. The city Tel Aviv was only about twenty years old then, very modern buildings.

Not really. Just another day.

Sometimes.

We actually, I got a leave to Beirut. That’s a very nice place, I’ve got photos over there too.

It was usually

several of us, went anywhere. At Beirut we were on leave there and we had a camp on the beach, it was right on the ocean. Most of those Middle East cities are right on the ocean. And we got word, we saw the local papers come out. They used to print papers in English and their own language and the headlines of the paper

were a big panic, the Germans have got down to sixty miles from Alexandria. They were in Egypt and we’d lost every battle in the war up till then. The New Zealanders were with us there and they were rushed off up there. We were recalled from the leave camp.

From all states

but we were a West Australian, South Australian unit originally.

Yes.

Sometimes yeah and sometimes no. The ones I was with this day, I’ve got the photo there of the café in Beirut,

they were South Australians. I think I was the only West Australian there at that time. From that photo I’m the only one left.

A lot of French in Beirut. In high school here

in our day they only taught French probably. Everyone that wanted to learn a foreign language had to learn French. Some of them said, “I speak French, I did French in school. I’ll be right,” and they would say, “Where did you learn French?” and they’d say, “Out of a book.” “The book’s wrong, different accent, no one will understand it.” They used to promenade. Sunday afternoons I think it was. Everybody got dressed up

and strolled along the promenade. That’s an old French custom.

Yes.

Oh it was good, something different. And just down the beach a bit was a great big Australian two-up game going on.

Very little, I didn’t go for gambling much.

Yes.

I don’t know. I suppose they were their wives and girlfriends.

Well, I think the women used to sort of steer clear of us a bit. Those days

they were considered to be not quite so nice if they mixed with foreign servicemen. Especially in Israel, Palestine. None of the Jewish women would have anything to do with you. They might say, “Hi,” something like that or talk to you in the shop or something like that.

Yes.

Yeah.

Oh we were just told, we were called from the leave camp to get back there, we’re moving out I think it was tomorrow, the next day. We travelled, leaving before daylight and stopping after dark, all out, guns, everything, our own vehicles.

That’s when we used to sleep alongside the truck and if it rained we crawled underneath. We thought well this is it, it’s on. The 6th and 7th Divisions had just gone home. The rumours were flying around, we’re off home, back to Australia and when we got somewhere, I think it’s where you cross the Suez Canal

if we turned left we were going back to Australia to the port and if we turned right we were going on up to the desert. We had a pretty good idea where we were going and even the locals in Syria, we’d say, “We’re leaving now,” and some of them were crying, especially some of the girls. We said, “We’re off back to Australia,” and they’d say, “Oh no, you no go to Australia, you’re going to desert, boom boom,” and they were right.

Word went around, if we turn left we’re right, if we’re turn right we’re left, left behind. We knew it was on then, as soon as we got over the Suez Canal. We must have been going in that convoy, starting before daylight and stopping after dark. Cooking with primus stoves, we did it in each individual vehicle, cooking,

opening the tins and heating it up. Half a kerosene tin cut off and heated up on the primus. , I’ve got a photo there of that convoy going through the Sinai Desert, at Beersheba and when we got to Alexandria there was only sixty mile from there and we were there for about two days

and they said, “Moving out about five o’clock in the morning.”

No.

It was an average reception port. It was, the locals were pretty, they didn’t care whether we were there or the Germans.

They were out for anything they could take from us. You couldn’t trust them. They’d steal anything they could get their hands on. We used to call them “Wogs.”

Not that stage, no. I went there for a couple of days before that.

Yes.

No. There was an air raid at Alexandria the first night we got there. We had a grandstand view of it because we were out up on higher ground we had a grandstand view of that.

The usual. They used to get bombed about every second night because it was a port and they used to leave their [(UNCLEAR)].

All the noise and the search lights and bombs going off.

I suppose it would be.

No.

When we were up at Alamein.

It wasn’t bombing cities it was bombing areas where the troops were.

No.

We would have been quite a distance away from it. We were up on a hill and we could see it.

Oh it was, yes.

Just the flashes and the explosions and the search lights.

We were only there for about two days before we moved on.

Straight up the front line. We went up, singing our heads off.

We weren’t singing that night.

I forget now. I don’t remember exactly what we were singing. We were very excited.

Oh yes. When you were talking to anyone and you were going to leave them the saying those days was, “See you later,” or, “So long,” or something like that. From then on it was, “Keep your head down.”

Doesn’t matter, as long as you’ve got that head down..

Not that time we didn’t go. We stayed at the staging camp, wasn’t a camp even. Just the ground on a hill.

It was called Merg al Arab, the area. We were there just getting everything ready to move on.

We were told we were going into action.

We knew that from the newspapers.

Excited. It’s on at last. That’s what we’re trained for. We were all for it.

Yes.

They called them the Afrika Korps and they were

the cream of the German army. They had Panzer divisions. The Panzers were the armoured units.

They were picked troops like the SAS [Special Air Service] is today.

Yes.

About two days, no more.

Just getting everything ready, you know, we’d been traveling for about a week, day and night, not day and night but into the dark hours sometimes and everything had to be sorted out and make sure we had everything right.

Well there wasn’t a great lot, we just had to

see that everything’s all right . You don’t have to do much if your guns are ready. Make sure you’ve got the right ammunition. You use a lot of ammunition. There’s four rounds in a box but that’s a hundred pound weight, twenty five pounder shell. That’s just the projectile. In a separate ammunition we had a charge that was set. So we had to have all the ammunition. It takes quite a lot of ammunition.

Only our regiment. The whole division was scattered over a fairly big area. There was about a twenty thousand men in a division, roughly.

They were doing the same thing. There was all sections of an army. There was the engineers, there was the field ambulance,

the army service corps that keep the supplies up to you, the engineers.

Mm

Our CO [Commanding Officer] just said that we were moving up to the front. We were moving off before daylight.

That was the night before. Everyone was going around discussing it.

Wondered what it would be like and wondered what Mum and Dad would think if they saw us now, things like that.

I can add a bit more to that later on.

I don’t think they were frightened but the next day they were. You can’t go seeing that without being a bit frightened.

No. Montgomery wasn’t there

at that stage. We weren’t part of the British 8th Army at that stage. When Montgomery came. We were at Alamein for five months. The big offence, when we joined the 8th Army, it was twelve days that battle, day and night to hit the Germans.

Churchill came over to see us just before that. Churchill, with his bowler hat. One of the Australians, we’d been in the desert for a couple of months and we didn’t have to shave every day because of lack of razor blades and lack of water and he was one of the roughest blokes you’d ever seen. Tall, skinny bloke with half his front teeth missing. We’d got to the stage where we had

sleeves out of our shirts and shorts, we wore shorts and shirts and boots without socks, never wash our socks. You couldn’t have seen anyone rougher than this bloke. He yelled out. Churchill went, there was a desert road and a railway line and he went along the road in the back of a utility standing up giving the V for victory sign, a cigar in his mouth

and his bowler hat. We lined the road and this bloke yelled out, “What about a cigar Winnie?” and he nodded to him and he said, “Well give us it,” and he ran after him and he got the cigar off him. One of the war correspondents took a photo of him. They were around all the time, the war correspondents. He took a photo of him because it was in the paper. We had our

papers over there, army papers. We had them everywhere we went, even on the Queen Mary we had the QM Daily and had his photo on the front page, a great big, half his teeth missing and about a fortnight’s growth on his face with this big cigar.

No that was before the big offensive.

See now, I can explain it to you. The British 8th Army they had hell knocked out of them because the Germans had short lines of supply because the ships were coming in as far down as Tobruk. They had Tobruk Harbour. When they reached Alamein they had long

lines of supply and the British navy and army, Australians, were sinking their shipping and they had to stop them and organize to get going again and he was building up for a big offensive and so were we. That four months before Alamein, it was pretty fierce fighting but there were times there when there was very little. We used to have a hate session in the morning and they had a hate session in the afternoon

because we’d have the sun in our eyes in the afternoon and you could just about bet on what was going to happen. Even at night we’d fire a few every now and then just to keep them awake and they used to do it to us. The main part, the battle of Alamein, for us, was the last twelve days.

We left before daylight, we moved up close and the next morning we went out before daylight and got into position and opened up on them before daylight.

The Germans believed that we all had gone home. They had an attack on an Italian position and a German position and they told them to go in screaming out, “Australianos!” on the Italians and they captured a hell of a lot. The Italian artillery were firing at us and the Germans brought their big eighty eight millimetres into it, they were firing at us. It wasn’t long before the diver bombers,

the Stukas came over looking for us. They always looked for the artillery to knock it out. We used to call ourselves the crab bait, to draw the crabs on us. It was skirmishes like that at that time, then we would capture beaches and they would. It was desert. It wasn’t all just white sand, it was rocky, hard rocky places.

When we had to dig in your gun position it was all pick and shovel work and it was very hard work. Our hands were very hard. All of us had calluses all over our hands, hard, very hard hands. The sore hands didn’t last long because they’d hardened up. Some days were quiet. When there’s a dust storm. We didn’t mind a dust storm

because you couldn’t do anything. You lay down and had a rest. You couldn’t do anything, you couldn’t see. Vehicles used to be dispersed so they wouldn’t all get hit with one hit and the usual was about twenty yards apart. If you had a friend on one of the other vehicles, when I say vehicles, that was gun and tractors, and if you went

to see one of yours and a dust storm came up, or it became dark, you had a hell of a job getting back to your own vehicle, for some reason. With a dust storm we used to think, “Ah well, we’re pretty safe now, have a good rest.” They always told us to get as much rest as you can because you never know when you’re not going to get any. They used to teach us that. Told you to sleep all day but

there’s time when you didn’t get any. That went on for about four, five months and then Montgomery came and we had turns of being brought out and rested and he gave us the talk. I remember it as well as anything, he said that, the Americans came into the war just before that

and we got American aircraft, medium bombers, we got tanks because our tanks were no match for the Germans, we got tanks just as good as the Germans, if not better some of them. And more, what we used to call, anti-tank guns, that fired armour piercing [shells], smaller than ours, you could bring them right up with the infantry. Armour piercing shell would knock a tank out,

they’d go straight through as if a big metal drill had drilled a hole through the tank and they got inside and you’d have to shovel what was left of the blokes out of those tanks. There was that spinning around and concussion when it hit, hard enough to go through there and they were shut in. With their artillery, their artillery was better than ours.

Montgomery gave us a talk the night before, no, we were preparing because we knew we were going to have a big offensive and we got all this new equipment and what we did at night, in darkness, we got right up, much closer than we used to get. We dug in, three or four nights we were going up in the dark and getting back before daylight

and digging these gun pits to go into and a gun pit was almost as big as this room. It had a gun, a trailer, ammunition stack all round and we put camouflage nets over it and they never woke up to that. They were building up, so were we and they never found out where. They knew there was a lot of fifth column,

that we weren’t ready. Montgomery had a double in England, being shown quite a lot. There were spies everywhere. There were even Japanese spies in Australia. We got all our positions ready and the day before the big offensive, when nine hundred guns opened up right on the dot

at ten o’clock in the evening, just imagine the flashes from the light and that, poor old Germans sitting back having a quiet smoke after dark and that lot came over in one hit. Shows you how good they were, we fired like that for twelve days. Infantry were attacking, we were firing, the air force was bombing and it still took twelve days to shift them. Montgomery’s speech was,

“We’re going to hit him for a six right out of Africa.” He went on about all the new aircraft we had, the medium bombers and he said, the fire orders were, we moved up the night before and we had to lie there all day.

We couldn’t get up and walk around. If you want to have a piddle or anything you’d put it in an empty tin and throw it out. It would really have given the show away if you’d walked around, you just had to hide. When it got dark we prepared a bit, got all our ammunition ready to fire. Montgomery’s orders were,

he didn’t tell us this, it was given to our CO to pass on to the officers to tell us, “You will attack and destroy the enemy in this area. You will fight to the last breath in your bodies. There will be no surrender and no prisoners will be taken.” It didn’t mean we had to shoot them but it meant we couldn’t waste time taking them back,

they just had to walk back on their own. One of the chaps sitting next to me, he said, “I’m going to write home to Mum, tell her not to worry anymore because I can do all the worrying from now on,” after that and then that was around about ten o’clock at night. There was big heavier

artillery behind us and right on the dot, all watches had been synchronized, bang. They call it “the night hell broke loose.” That went on for twelve days, firing day and night and for the first two days we didn’t have any sleep.

We were working hard, stacking ammunition, getting ammunition brought up to you, every now and then you’d get a target, you’d have to jump in and start firing. At the end of the second day I thought, “You can’t go on much longer without some sleep.” I’ve seen men go to sleep standing up. I’ve seen men sitting on the edge of the gun pit and every time the gun’s fired they’d jump but it wouldn’t wake them up. They used to get that tired. That went for

twelve days. You might have had an hour here or there in between targets. You’d be able to drop off straight away to sleep then you’d get a post, you’d need to get up and start firing again. Those shells were twenty five pound, one man had to grab it from the stack and hand it to you and he had it in his hand like that. The breech was opened,

slam that up. The one on the other side, the number two had a ram rod. He used to ram it in. Because the shells had a copper band which sealed the gases in the bore there was lenses in the gun, the bore and that sealed the gases because the gases would project the shell, and then he whacked the cartridge case up and I’d shut the breech. The bloke who was doing the gun laying, the one that used to

listen to all the orders and different directions and that, he had a firing lever and he just whacked it like that. The recoil used to come back about, over a metre as it fired. The chap, number two would put his hand out, grab the handle of the breech as it came back and whip it open. Then he’d eject the cartridge case, they used to toss that aside. They were hot too. It just went on and on like that. Sometimes you got ammunition you had to set fuses.

To delay. Another one was airburst, it would burst in the air. We had smoke shells to put a smokescreen down. If infantry were getting a pasting somewhere we’d put a smokescreen up. We’d fire it right where it was wanted. One day, it was early in the piece, we went out in front of the infantry.

We were supposed to be there before daylight and the usual army muck ups it was daylight when we were going in, in front of the infantry and of course, it was an Italian position but the Germans had it covered with their artillery and the German artillery is pretty good too, but we knocked all their guns out. There would be about a battery,

about four, might be more, might have been eight. We knocked all them out. They all came in. The company of infantry were behind us and they came through after we fired the barrage into there and they didn’t fight, they just surrendered. The German artillery got onto us

and how that chap got the Military Medal. A battery is two troops of four guns. One of the troops of four guns got lost coming in, something happened, we couldn’t find it. This chap, W. Hill, a young chap, he was a good friend of mine. He’d been in Tobruk. He had his eighteenth birthday in Tobruk and he was wounded in the head.

His older brother claimed him in our unit after he came out of hospital and he was a mate of mine there. They were wondering what happened to the other four guns and he said, “I think I know where they are,” and so he volunteered to go back and get them. He grabbed a British Army scout car, a small armoured vehicle. They can go a lot faster, they were on rubber wheels, they weren’t on tracks.

He said, “Go over here, go that way, go in that direction.” It was just open desert, there was hills but just open desert, you could go on the flat for just about three kilometers on a fine day, no dust. He pulled up and he said, “There’s German tanks in that area, I’m not going in there.” So Tommy jumped out and he started walking

and they used to dig a pit in the desert for the vehicles to go in so the engine would be protected. Just like a sloping pit, just enough to take the engine. There was a British Army soldier sitting in this truck and Tommy went over. He said, “I want your truck.” Tommy was only a gunner, he didn’t have any rank. He said, “I want your truck,

there’s a big problem here and I’ve got to go and find some guns,” and he said, “I don’t take orders from you. No way I’ll take orders from you.” Tommy was pretty handy with his fists, he just clouted him, pulled him out of the truck and took it. He finished up, he found them and brought them in, they had to come in under heavy fire too because we were already in there and he got awarded a Military Medal for it.

There was rumours saying, we don’t know how many lives he could have saved because we don’t know what the outcome would have been, but we were having a tough time there with just the four guns. The Italian artillery and the Germans having a pot at us. He got the Military Medal.

The Italian artillery was pretty good and the German was very good.

Oh well,

I would say they’d be firing in, maybe four guns, I’m only guessing this and they’d fire every few minutes. It’s amazing not one of our guns was knocked out and we had several casualties that day, killed.

Then the Stukas came over and dive bombed us. They used to cause some casualties but they weren’t that accurate. They’d dive straight down. You could see the two men in the aircraft. You could see their goggles and the helmets on their head. They were a very slow old thing, the Stuka. They used to dive straight down and release a five hundred pound bomb

and as they went up the bloke in the rear would let fire with a machine gun or a cannon. It was amazing how you can go through with a lot of casualties and not get, some blokes were lucky enough not to get hit. It’s just the way it goes. There’s men in the 9th Division in the infantry, they went through Tobruk, Alamein, Leyte and New Guinea

where they had a lot of casualties and Borneo and I’d say about half a dozen out of those men, and infantry had the most casualties, there would be at least a dozen men in all those battalions that got through the lot without being seriously wounded.

No guns were knocked out of action. We had men killed in near misses.

No, not in my gun crew. Two of my good friends on one of the other guns, they had bad leg wounds and they were put into the ambulance. The ambulance used to come into all that. The ambulance,

he strapped them in and took off to go back and he hit a mine and the wheel went up through the ambulance and it turned over and they were both conscious and they were both strapped in and they could smell the petrol running out. Luckily the driver stopped the engine and he got out, he got them out of it, they both survived. They both had bad leg wounds.

As a matter of fact, one of them, I went to see him in South Australia about two years ago and he showed me the bit of shrapnel that they took out of his leg and he still had a bit in him they wouldn’t shift, they said it was dangerous to shift. He lived with that in his leg.

Well we had the four guns and they were about, I would say twenty yards apart, staggered a bit,

and we didn’t have time for digging in, there was no pits. We didn’t have time for camouflage nets. When we were in a static position we used to dig a nice pit, sometimes even sandbagged it and then we put a camouflage net up, kept the sun off you, that camouflages you a little bit, but you can’t hide big guns in the desert. Even when you’re firing them

there’s a big flash and a blast mark out the front like where the waves have been coming in to the beach, the blast, the concussion that blows the sand into little heaps. You could see that out the front. The aircraft used to come down pretty low.

We were, we had a lot,

out of the twenty-four guns in the regiment, we had five put out of action and they were worn out at the finish because we fired, in that actual battle of Alamein, our twenty-four guns and we were only one regiment, there were three Australian regiments there and God knows how many British and South Africans, Scots and everything,

we fired almost nine hundred shells in that twelve days. That’s how much sleep we had. The whole campaign, the four months, we fired a hundred and fifteen thousand rounds. Goodness knows what we fired in that. Guns were replaced

if they were knocked out, they were replaced.

I was pretty skinny. I was pretty fit. We were on mostly tinned food. We used to get what we called desert sores. If you knocked the skin off, which you did on knees and elbows, especially going down on hard ground. If you weren’t fighting,

using your guns, your threw yourself down when you heard a shell, it was just like a scream and then a bang. You just threw yourself down. You might have been a working party unloading a truck and you just threw yourself down. Of course you skinned your knees and elbows and they wouldn’t heal, we used to call them desert sores. I was pretty skinny. I was five foot seven and I wouldn’t have been any more than,

I think my heaviest would have been around nine stone. You could count me ribs. Me shoulder blades used to stick out. Quite a few got yellow jaundice, it was a bad one. I never had to be evacuated sick and I never had to be evacuated wounded. I had no wounds bad enough to be evacuated, just a dressing.

We used to be hit a lot with stones, the rocky ground and the shell fire, stones come up too. Got quite a bit more injuries like that.

Well I don’t remember but we got very little, I can tell you that. We wouldn’t have had more than about an hour at a time.

No.

Just used to lay down in the gun pit, but had a bit of room around. There’d be about a metre from the edge of the gun and the trailer that was in there. That ammunition would be stacked all around so you were lying down amongst high explosives.

We had three ton trucks and it was the night that the Germans moved on.We had what we called a slit trench. If you got below ground, your whole body, you reckoned you were pretty safe because they’d have to put it in there with you, and we had these slit trenches dug back behind the guns. When you had firing orders

you had a tin megaphone and we had to hear those orders and it was about twenty yards away, the command post. Sometimes a man had to go halfway and relay the orders on. We had time, we dug a slit to jump into. Most of the times I was out there something happened, we got shelled or a dive bomber come over. Anyhow,

it was as good as over, we were just firing a few while they were evacuating. I laid in this slit trench to have a sleep, we used to use a tin hat for a pillow, just below ground level. A big three ton dual wheeled truck, three ton – they carried three ton, dual wheels on the back. It was a bit moonlight

and I woke up with this bloke laughing. “God,” he said, “look how close we went to this bloke,” they’d been in, unloaded and gone out. He was leading them out. “Look how close we went to this bloke.” His wheels were that far from my head when they were coming in, loaded up. That’s how lucky I was. I lost a lot of good mates. I had people killed

very close to me. I mean, positions near me. But you’ve got to be the lucky one to get through it.

Well, you got hardened to it. It was bad, bad to lose someone. We got hardened to it. There was days when you thought, “Yeah, I’m gonna get through this,”

and other days someone would get wounded and go out and you’d think, “He’s a lucky bugger. He’s gone out. I might get mine in the head,” that was the things we used to say. Even a bloke who lost a leg someone would say, “He’s lucky,” and other days. What made it a lot easier was there was always that hard case that would crack a joke when things got really bad,

he’d crack a joke and everybody would laugh.

Well one of them. We went on a working party once when things were fairly quiet and we had to go to get, I think it was ammunition or something. We were in this truck,

it was down near the coast, it was just after sundown. For some reason there was a fairly big hole there that you could put a truck in. We’d pulled up, we jumped in because the sky was pretty much black with German aircraft coming over, they were just looking for a target. We jumped into this hole and I looked up and you couldn’t see the sky for German planes.

This bloke was a real hard case. We had a fella there started saying his prayers. Catholics used to carry their beads you know, they’d go through. This bloke was starting to say a few prayers and this hard case said, “It’s no good calling it in, how could he get down through all that lot?” because our ack-ack [anti-aircraft guns] were firing at them

because that comes down on you. That shrapnel has got to fall somewhere. That’s one of the things. Another one he was Scotch and he used to say, a couple of places we were in we got bombed at night, we were in dugouts and things at night and this Scotsman used to say, “They’re coming doon noow,” and then, “For God’s sake Jock, shut up,

we know they’re coming down.”

We went on to a place called El Daba. Before that, they had a mosque, an old mosque, goodness knows why it was there, a railway station and an old mosque. It had a big tower, like they had. We weren’t allowed to fire on it because it was religious.

Yet in Italy in Casino was a very big monastery, five hundred years old, and the Yanks reduced it to rubble because the Germans were using it. We knew the Germans were using it and when I said about not having a wash, every now and then a few of us would get down to the Mediterranean, sometimes we were in walking distance of it. We used to have a swim there.

After the break through I climbed up the tower in this mosque. You could see right down to the beach where we used to swim and they didn’t fire on us. They knew he was using it as an observation post.

Well, I was hoping. Your thoughts are mixed.

At times you get pretty worried and at other times, as I said before, you get hardened to it. You’ve got to do it so you’ve got to do it.

Well they were still firing a few shells back at us and they told us that we were moving on. We moved up three times in that twelve days, different positions.

We went on to El Daba and that had been a big German base. There was a train load of German equipment, the engine had been knocked out. The Germans had trains right down that far, we didn’t have trains at all. It was full of food, clothing.

The first time I’d seen black bread, the Germans had black bread.

Yeah. They had very good quality shirt and shorts for the desert and they had the eagle and swastika on here. They had caps with the German eagle on it. We got all this clothing, our clothes were absolutely worn out.

We were wearing these German uniforms. You’d think we were in the German army because we had the German tin hats, we didn’t wear them but we had them on our vehicles, over the head lights and that. Anyhow we’d wear a shirt for the day and throw it away, put a new pair on. The Mauser rifles they had them wired on all over the sides of the truck, they were a beautiful rifle.

No, a bit of fun.

Yeah. They didn’t use the headlights. They got brand new trucks and cut the canopies right off with a hacksaw so’s you could watch the sky as you were driving along.

Just for souvenirs. A bit of fun.

No. We never used the lights. Used to get fairly moonlight there, sometimes you could read by moonlight.

Well we had tents. We’d bury them there, in the desert.

We had shovels with us. We’d dig a grave

We used to wrap them in a blanket and they were all taken in afterwards. We’d mark it with, we used to shove the empty shell cases which were brass [(UNCLEAR)] round it and the infantry used to put the rifles in the ground and put the tin hat on it.

We had three tags round our neck and they’d

leave one on, take the other two off and put it over the rifle or whatever you had to mark the grave.

At times you might only get one or two killed in a day, when it was just a bit static. But when there was a lot being killed

sometimes they would just leave them, the ambulance people used to, they would take the wounded people away but they couldn’t stop and bury them.You just had to leave them for somebody else to do it.

The tanks used to, quite often were having a battle out in the front of us and they used to fire all sorts of smoke signals up to one another. We used to see a lot of that.

Where they had to manoeuver to, over there, over there.

No. Aircraft would come and bomb and we’d see all the

dirt and stuff going up. The anti-aircraft fire going up at them. The size of our guns, the Germans had one around the same. Their guns were used for anti aircraft too. They could use them for anti-tank, anti-aircraft. They used to explode up in the air. You’d see that, all the puffs all around these bombers going in. When the actual battle of Alamein started, they had American medium bombers and

we used to call them the football team, there was eighteen in a flight and one lot was coming back and the other lot was going up all day. You’d see that around midday. We’d say, “Iron [(UNCLEAR)] for lunch Jerry [German].”

Well it went on all day in the battle of Alamein. That’s how good an army they were. They planned it for ten days and he lasted for twelve and when

he did hit back he hit back pretty hard too. But we didn’t go on. If it hadn’t been for the Japs we would have gone on through Italy, Sicily and Italy.

You’d have to keep the gun firing as fast as the orders came. Sometimes they would say, “Ten rounds gunfire,” other times

they’d say, if they got on a good target they’d just say, “Rapid,” if infantry were being attacked in tanks, the Germans used to ride in on the tanks, and we used to, we had all that area in front of the infantry all ranged on, a gun program made up, they had code words. At Alamein they were all towns in Queensland, they’d say, “Fire on Rockhampton,” and in a few seconds we’d be popping shells in there.

That was the code name, we had the gun program there, we knew exactly.

Well it was for twelve days of Alamein they didn’t change.

Most of the towns in Queensland, all the big towns.

Yeah. Bundaberg.

Very often.

Well it depends where they were being attacked.

No, it wouldn’t be that often. It was never constant, it varied. We inflicted a lot of casualties

on the Germans half way through the battle of Alamein. He brought these special troops straight over, flew them over, picked German troops from Italy.

We used to get that. I don’t know really.

No we’d be getting it from our command post.

What they did, they had them on trucks to bring them up and they made the mistake of bringing them up too far on the trucks, right within range of our, we had twenty-four guns. There was quite a few regiments like us, could bring fire to the one target and we all opened up with everything we could give them. We really did a lot of damage.

They used to tell us. The chap, the observation post doing the firing, the shoot, he was in touch with our command post, by telephone or sometimes radio. Those chaps used to get out in front of the infantry and they had to go out and get into a little dugout or something or a pit in darkness. They had their gear to carry and the officer had a revolver

and the signaller, his assistant, the bloke that did a lot of the brain work for him, had other gear to carry. Had to carry a rifle and everything. They were out in front of the infantry. They had to go out before daylight. This night they had decided to sleep there. It was just before dawn and I saw these, quite a few men

coming from the horizon. They talked it over, “We’ve got one revolver, what are we going to do, we’re going to use that up and be killed or be taken prisoner, what will we do?” And a voice come out in English, “Are prisoners welcome?” and it was Italians coming in to surrender. You

couldn’t blame Italians because they hated Mussolini, they were conscripts, they just didn’t want to be in the war, they had no say.

There was quite a lot. A lot of those were sent back to Australia and still live there. We had a

Polish Division. They were very good soldiers. Very excitable. We’d tell them to ration that ammunition. It had to be taken up by the navy.

No. We had a good supply. We fired all that.

It was, yes.

You just had to. The last day we moved up, he’d gone, we moved up and that night the only time it ever rained in the four months we were there. We were laying down on the ground.

One lone German aircraft came over and dropped what they called a basket bomb. Little ones. They open up on a parachute and scatter all over the place. We were just laying out in the open and it started to rain and I crawled under the vehicle and couldn’t get warm. We’d been hot for that long, although it used to get cold at night and I got a dose of bronchitis,

being run down like that and I got dengue fever which I still get up to a few years ago. It’s like malaria, it’s a mosquito born disease. It’s pretty common. They used to get it in Darwin a lot before the war. The doctors here often don’t even know about it.

It was finished. We were there for, I felt I was sick, I wasn’t evacuated and I had a high temperature from the dengue fever plus the bronchitis and I smoked. I’ve never had a cold in the chest since I gave up smoking. We went back to the actual area where we were doing the fighting to wait there till they could get us back to Alexandria

to come home and all the knocked out guns and tanks and quite a lot of German dead were still there.

They brought the dead into what they called the Alamein cemetery. People still go over there now to see it. We had quite a few, they used to call for volunteers to go and bury, not a very nice job. They were usually wrapped in a blanket.

No. I wasn’t off duty altogether, I wasn’t in dressing station, hospital or anything. There was German dead everywhere. Some of them had gone black. Tanks and vehicles and that knocked out. The Germans hadn’t stopped to bury, we didn’t either.

We were just salvaging anything, vehicles or anything we could use again. I don’t know what happened. They took us back to the camp near Gaza to wait to go home just before Christmas and on the way back we went day and night again, cooking with the primus. There’s five of us in this vehicle.

We opened the tins in the dark, meat and vegetable. They always had a bitter taste, it was probably the preservatives in it. We had this tin cut off, kerosene tin, on the primus, in the dark, we started eating and someone said, “God that tastes crook,” and I said, “It’s always crook, eat it,” and within ten minutes we all had ptomaine poisoning,, one of the tins must have been blown up, and were we sick

and being run down, had these desert sores all over me, skinny as hell. They took us by ambulance, we were fairly well on the way back to Palestine and I think we had to go about sixty mile to get to this Australian Army hospital in Palestine. It was a permanent building, it was a very nice hospital, it was there before the war.

We went back and we were about two weeks waiting to come home.

Yes.

Yes. We had quite a few, but the Luger revolver was the main prize.

There’s a story behind that. We had all sorts of things. I had an Italian cup, an oval cup like that, I used for a shaving mug for years after the war and it was aluminium. They had, someone grabbed a haversack, something like that. I had quite a few photos I’d picked up, I’ve still got them.

As I said we had the German tin hats and the rifles. They were just left with our vehicles, our vehicles stayed there and our guns. Anyhow we were due to come back, we had Christmas, I was a fortnight in hospital with the poisoning in the dysentery ward and I just got right and I came back to my unit and it was Christmas Eve.

No I didn’t have a Luger but they were the prize.

A Luger yeah, because you could get good money for that back in Australia. We had an order to get rid of it all. People, they were trying to hide things.

Just the army rules, you weren’t meant to take it home. So anyhow a few days before we got onto the ship,

everyone out on a route march, cleared the whole camp out, they went through all our gear while we weren’t there. One of my friends, he was a good soldier too, he only had a German haversack but he always used to run the gambling and of course that was illegal, and they knew what he was doing. He had his dice and all that in it, gambling gear, and they put him on a charge and he got twenty eight days detention and he went home under detention, served his twenty-eight days while we all went on leave

just because he disobeyed a lawful order. If he had of thrown it away like most of them did, very few handed them in.

He thought it was pretty unfair.

At night time, they couldn’t move up to our position in the daylight so as soon as it got dark,

especially at nights when there wasn’t much doing you’d hear this vehicle coming along. It was hard, most vehicles could drive without getting bogged, hard rocky ground. You’d hear this chug chug chug, of a utility, all of a sudden, “Come and get your coffee,” they used to bring the coffee there. That’s why all army blokes always did something for Salvos, a soft spot for them.

No. Bush Baptist. We aren’t Catholics now, but we were. I don’t know why. My great grandfather is buried in the Monastery in Clare.

Oh yes, I’m lucky to still be alive now.

Oh yes.

Well I was always having

bad accidents as a kid but I never ever went to hospital once. I always just missed. My father used to say, “You’ve got the luck of a Chinaman,” because a Chinaman was supposed to be lucky in Australia. If they saw a Chinaman they used to touch him for luck. They used to say, “You’ve got the luck of a Chinaman.” I used to sometimes when things got really tough, we were sheltering from an attack, I’d used to say, “I hope he’s right, I hope he’s right.”

Yeah. When we got back to Palestine.

Mm. He apologized to us afterwards.

He sent a message to all ranks saying that he told us it would only be ten days but it was twelve and he was sorry and what a marvellous job

we’d done, they couldn’t have won the Battle of El Alamein without the Australian 9th Division. They printed a book, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, it’s called ‘The Magnificent 9th’. We fired more ammunition than any other division, we fought in more battles than any other division, we caused more casualties on the enemy than any other division; and the Australian 7th Division was the only division in the Australian Army that fought all the King’s enemies.

They fought the Foreign Legion and the Germans and the Japs and the Italians.

We were pleased he thanked us. We had another big parade before we left in Palestine for General Alexander, his understudy. He was next in line.

Yes. The campaign was finished for us. We would have like to have gone on.

We went back to the battle area, just cleaning up, salvaging anything worth salvaging.

We didn’t worry about burying any dead, we just put up with it, with the smell, and we just waited there. We were right on the coast. Australians always had the coastal area. We were lucky that way. I was pretty sick at that time.

Very little. I might have got Aspros [aspirin] or something like that. We only had a field dressing station, we didn’t have a large, it was only our unit dressing stage.

Actually I kept fairly quiet about it.

When I did go, I used to get, it was nothing, I wasn’t really treated for it. When I went to hospital they kept me in a fortnight and the others were out next day.

No, it was on our way back, by ambulance.

The whole unit came back to Palestine, the convoy.

I got there in an ambulance.

Yes and I had a pair of German shorts and a German shirt and when I got out of hospital, and go through the clothing store, he’s going through a great clothing list and I was saying, “No, no, no,” and he said, “Did you come in here naked?” I said, “Pretty close to being naked.

I had a pair of German boots,” they were beautiful boots, they came up high, “German shorts, German shirt.” I had to get a full new kit.

We were just waiting to come home.

I’d say it would be about three or four weeks.

In a camp near Gaza. We had Christmas there.

It was just rows of tents and a couple of big sheds for mess hut. That was when they gave us two bottles of beer each. We drank those straight out of the bottle and we thought we’d get some more after we’d had lunch, we’ll get some more. We went to an Arab village close by and got this cheap wine for about twenty cents a bottle in our money

and we got liquid Sal Vital, fizzy drink. We used to cut a bottle top off the drink, we used to call it a Lady Blamey, we were filling that up with wine, putting the Sal Vital in, and drinking down, down. I finished up that night on the side of the road in Gaza which was two or three mile from where I should have been. I woke up daylight

in the morning on the side of the road. Nice and sick.

I didn’t have a meal next day. I went back and one of the officers called me up and said, “What happened to you yesterday?” He said, “You came into the officers’ mess,” which was chargeable. “We were sitting down to our Christmas evening meal and you wanted to fight the lot of us.”

That chap has just died about a week ago, over in Brisbane.

No, not really.

No I got away with it, being Christmas I suppose, and seeing we were going home, everyone’s happy, including the officers.

We knew right from the start because that’s why we didn’t go on. We were told

to go back to Australia.

Well. We thought it was good, we would have liked to have gone with the other two divisions.

Yes.

Well we knew the Japanese were attacking Australia. Darwin had been bombed. Broome and other places up there had been shot up.

On the Egyptian barges. When you get all crowded like that, like sheep, a lot of chaps had been shearers, roustabouts, farmers and when they drive sheep, most Australians would say, “Ho, ho, ho,” try to sound like a dog barking, that started and from then on that was our battle cry, that came up again

in Borneo. One of the American correspondents, he was going in the barge. He said, “I’ve never been under fire before, what do I do?” They said, just do what we do. He went with the infantry. The barge hit the beach, the ramp dropped and they all ran out yelling, “Ho, ho, ho,” so he said, “I yelled out Ho, ho, ho and went after them.”

That was in the Saturday Evening Post, I read that

after the war.

Mmm.

It was the Nieuw Amsterdam.

Beautiful ship. It was Holland’s biggest, best liner. It was the first ship in the world to have a fancy rubber promenade deck.

It was all the biggest ships in the world, the biggest convoy ever to sail the Indian Ocean. The whole British Eastern Fleet.

There was twenty thousand of us, maybe more.

To get us all home the best way they could.

I don’t think so, not with the

naval protection we had.

We had the whole British Eastern Fleet, even battleships. We didn’t see them, they were out away from us. We saw them on the second day, these enormous big battleships. One cruiser was in amongst us, the rest were out of sight. There was a submarine scare out of Fremantle and we went right down south.

It was February, hot and it was cold where we were. A big ship like that was still moving, you know, you were walking up hill one minute and down the next.

I’d only be guessing. I would say about four thousand.

We had hammocks. The lucky ones got cabins. The officers always go the cabins and the ladies. We had nurses, sisters and VADs [Voluntary Aid Detachments]. Even going on the Queen Mary I had a hammock down on the water level where the luggage used to go.

I like it.

You were always downhill. They were about that high off the deck, all this great big area with all these blokes sleeping in the hammock. Anyone that gets up at night to go to the toilet or something used to hit their head on your behind going through.

Very good.

I don’t remember now, but I couldn’t complain about the food.

Yes.

The desert was all tin and hard biscuits. No taste, flavour or anything. Tinned bully beef, that was our main diet. Tinned herrings, you know the oval tins of herrings, tomato sauce and that, we used to hate them. Goldfish we used to call them. We used to give them to the Poms because we had better food than the Poms, as bad as ours was. They had better equipment than us so we used to swap a few things over.

Oh yes, some of them. Actually a friend of mine did, he had a Luger. He got away with it. He wasn’t in our unit. He was in Perth not long after the war and he said I’ll flog this off, short of money and he picked a likely looking person in the pub one Saturday and said, “Luger,” and it was a detective. He got time.

He went to jail. For having the Luger illegally.

About two weeks.

Well, we used to have a few beers at night. No we had bottled beer,

quite often we got a bottle each. We had sing songs. Housey, bingo as they call it. Dice and boxing. I was in amateur boxing. Army boxing in the militia. When I got up to Queensland I did quite a bit of boxing.

No. I wasn’t feeling well enough.

Yes.

We had it anywhere we were camping for any stage of time in a base camp. We had all sports. We used to have the hurdles, the mile race, the half mile and all that competition.

Boxing. I took a liking to boxing when I was a young boy. I was very small and bullies were

as bad as they are now. You kept quiet about it. I was embarrassed to tell anyone about it. And I used to go down to the Royal Show and they used to have boxing tents. They were frauds. None of them were genuine. They were showmen. They were all the old has-beens with the cauliflower ears [damaged from boxing] and busted noses. I used to look at them and I’d say, “I’d love a pair of cauliflowers and a nose like that, love it.” No one would pick on me.

I’d look like a boxer. That’s how I got interested in it.

I was only eight stone when I started. Eight stone six was a bantam weight. That weight, you don’t get knocked around as much as a heavy weight would. You’re not getting hit that hard and if you’re fairly good you don’t get hit that much. I was fairly fast and I never got any cauliflowers or broken noses.

Yes. Up in Queensland they used to bet.

We were coming in about ten in the morning we could see the pine trees of Cottesloe, the first thing we could see. They’re over a hundred years old now those trees, Norfolk Pines.

It was a lovely sight. We didn’t really say goodbye to it because we went on the Queen Mary in the middle of the afternoon and we woke up the next morning and we were at sea. It was very good. Coming in through the Gage Roads [Fremantle] was just lined with warships, all nations, Americans, English, Dutch, Australian.

Someone starts this good natured mudslinging and it soon starts and it takes off. You’d think we were the worst enemies in the world, the insults that were going backwards and forwards. They were yelling out from the Texas. The language got a bit rough at times too. We had nursing sisters on board and VAT girls.

Yes. Same coming home in the big aircraft carrier, Sydney.

I forget now what it was. They used to sling off at the British navy being scruffy because our sailors, always immaculate, the British sailors. Different things like that. Of course the Yanks fell for it.

It was usually,

they told us when we were coming home we were going up against the almighty dollar when we get there, “Don’t think you’re going to get it easy,” you know, the girls are all Yank-happy and they were too. Not all of them, but a lot were. Things like that. I forget now. Anything we could think of.

It was.

There was a big barbed wire netting back from the wharf. You know the road comes in to the big sheds, well there’s a wire netting fence there, and the barbed wire. Most of the families were there from the West Australians coming off the ship there. They knew we were coming home.

My parents knew I was coming home. It was supposed to be a big secret. We weren’t even allowed to say what country we were in when we were overseas when we wrote letters and now if your son’s in the war you can sit home and watch him on telly. That’s the difference.

You know, it’s good to be home.

Why I’m smiling in that photo, one of the chaps who joined up with us was sick when we left, he was in hospital, he didn’t get away, he stayed in Australia they made him B class which is not A1. He was at the bottom of the gangway, he was on duty there and he saw me and he yelled out. Of course I’ve got a big grin on my face to him and I saw the chap there setting his camera up. The next lot, to lead them down. You can see I’ve got me respirator, gas respirator on me chest.

We had them right up until we landed at Borneo and then we threw them away when we landed at Borneo.

I never ever saw it. Even when it was on television I never saw it once.

People ringing me up, “You’re on telly.” Somebody rings me from Albany, “You’re on telly.” I never ever saw it once, Marie didn’t see it either. Marie wrote to the Golden West [TV] network. They said, “You send the tape down, we’ll do it for you.”

Yes.

I think it was CineSound, that was the company.

They used to do the newsreels as they called them, the start of the movies. They must have got it from the archive. He had all sorts. He had fire fighting and big sporting events on it. They were singing ‘True Blue’ all the way through it. I think it was about five commercials and he sent

the tape of the lot.

Yes.

Yes. Our daughter had that photograph taken off the tape. They’d only just found out how to do it at that time.

He just called out my name, waved to me. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years. I wondered what happened to him. I thought he might have got away, but he was made B class.

We went to a camp, the Melville camp, not far from Fremantle. They gave us three weeks.

No. We had three weeks. We got a lift in, someone gave us a lift in to Fremantle, we got a bus and I got off at the corner of the Karrakatta cemetery. That was all bush, there was no road. Where the hospitals are, was all bush too. I went down the side of the cemetery, in the dark and

I sort of did a little bit of a jog because I didn’t have far to go and an owl, a frogmouth, was on the fence and it went in front of my face. I got a fright. Next morning we had to go back. It was a sort of unofficial leave that night and we had to go back next morning. My father took me back. He was driving the car for the company he worked for.

He was a manager of the branch of the undertaker.

Melport. I kept saying, “Get over, you’re gonna hit this bloke.” I was used to driving on the left in the Middle East. It’s hard. It takes a while to get used to it. You think you’re going to hit everyone that comes along.

It’s on my discharge, I’ve got it in days.

I spent more days overseas than I did at, it was roughly two years, a bit under.

Meeting people that I used to know. We used to go to

town every day, to Perth.

The Globe. It’s now being demolished for the underground railway.

It’s opposite the Perth Railway Station, almost opposite.

Yes. All that railway buildings along there I think.

Yeah.

Well it was full of servicemen on leave. There was quite a few Dutch. There was Dutch Indonesians in the Dutch forces. Java was a Dutch possession at the time. They’d had them there for over a hundred years up until then. They fought in,

we had some of them up in the islands for us, in the Dutch army. Any amount of Yanks and Australian servicemen.

There was quite a bit of trouble. They used to get jealous of them because they had all the money and all the girls. A lot of chaps used to get pretty stroppy about it.

There was quite a few. There was even deaths.

There could have been. I know there was in Brisbane. Brisbane was the worst.

Brisbane had the most Americans, and Sydney had a lot too.

Well, it was a bit of a worry for us, Germany were the enemies and we could have done without that. That’s the way we used to think. We did get it in the Pacific War. It could have gone for another ten years hadn’t been for the atomic bomb.

It was around Christmas time when we were in Cairo. Singapore fell and Tobruk fell while we were there. Australians held it there and a few Poles, Free French and all that sort of thing, they held it for about five or six months.

They replaced them with British troops and some South Africans and they lost it in about three weeks.

Mmm.

It affected them. We were in a position there where we’d lost everything,

we’d lost every battle. When the Australians were there that was a victory because we stopped him. He was coming down with all his might and he just couldn’t get Tobruk.

It was good to get home but we had a bit of a feeling there, it’s not very good to go home half way through a war. We wanted to go home when the war was over.

There was a lot of people felt like that. You’ve got to go away again.

Mmm.

Yes.

When we got back here, we saw all the

navy and the equipment the Americans had here, we thought, “They’re going to save us,” and they did save us. Not with their fighting men but with their might, money, they saved England. They bailed England out, England was broke. We would have been, if England had of gone, wiped out of the Middle East it was only the Americans coming into the war. They only came in because they were bombed into it.

87% of American people voted against it until they were bombed. We would have been wiped out. We wouldn’t have had a chance.

They were very worried about it. They even walked off farms in north Queensland. There was many a farm

up there deserted.

They were all saying how bad it was in New Guinea, you know, wait until you get up there?

Yes.

Well we had blackouts, we didn’t have before we went away and there was air raid shelters all over the place, at bus stops and in Perth, right in the middle of Forrest Place, St.George’s Terrace, there was air raid shelters.

Yeah.

The kids dug trenches at school in case they were bombed or strafed.

Well, that’s about all we did do in those three weeks then we had to go all by train, Fremantle to Cairns.

It is when you’ve got to change trains at every state because of different rail gauge.

We went on anything they could muster up. You had different carriages, different states, from the Transline which was the transcontinental line in those days, it wasn’t air conditioned, to cattle trucks, goods vans.

We had all our equipment. We had big kitbags with rifles and tin hats [helmets]. Being artillery we were still carrying the rifles, tin hats. They jam you in a railway carriage that had three seats on one side and four on the other with a toilet with a door about that wide. Sometimes ten of us were in there with all our gear. There was no wash.

A water bag hanging outside to drink. We were fourteen days getting to Brisbane and they wanted to send us straight on up to Atherton and our CO said, “My men aren’t leaving, they haven’t had a wash for a fortnight.” We had coal dust in our hair from the coal burning train. The feet were stinking and they dumped us off on a very nice golf course

just outside Brisbane. A place called Yeerongpilly. We got there in the morning and it was about seven o’clock. They gave us our tents, we got the gear, we were still in our khakis, all the others were in green. We washed shirt and trousers under the tap, wrung them out, put them on wet, the sun would dry them, by the time we got into Brisbane they were dry.

We did that a lot, we used to do it in Sydney coming home, just wash them out under the tap, wring them out, put them on wet. Sometimes, going across the Nullabor a couple of engines broke down. They were very short of coal so we would go along the railway line picking up old sleepers. We were singing that song, “I’ll walk beside you,” the train was going slowly and we’re going on picking up sleepers.

The third was a goods wagon, coppers, the old copper, you know, for boiling water and that, how they did their washing in the early days, they used to boil their washing. With a steel plate on the floor and a fire in there and meat and veg and bully beef all put in like a stew. The train would stop and we’d get out, we carried our own eating gear like a tin box and they’d ladle it out

and we’d eat that then get on the train and go again. When we got to the stations, the cities, for some reason we had saveloys [frankfurts] all the way to Brisbane and from Brisbane up we had braised steak, it was quite good. We used to pull up at a station, and Country Women’s Association and people like that used to serve us.

We’d get into the train and off again. Sometimes we had to change trains. Carry all your gear. We got to Brisbane. Had a cold shower. It was summer time. Feel good after that. We got into town. It wasn’t any more than a half hour’s walk from

the golf links to Brisbane. Very few of us had been anywhere out of the state at all. I’d never been to another state. It was heart breaking to go through Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, looking at the station. It’s all we saw and anything you could see out the train window, right through. Anyhow, then we had two or three days in Brisbane. By the time they bailed the boys out of the lock up, some of them, fights with Yanks and things,

we went up to Cairns. That took several days. That was the same rail gauge as ours, very narrow. We went up to there, there’s some beautiful scenery there, from Brisbane to Cairns. When we got up to Cairns we had another full day getting to Atherton

up in the Tablelands. That was beautiful scenery too.

Yep. When we got back from the desert, the Middle East was mostly desert, we got to Melba camp and we were saying, “Look at those beautiful gum trees,” gum trees were firewood to us before that. When we got up to Atherton Railway Station

it was dark and there were army trucks there to take us to our camp. It was right on the Avon River, the Barron River, beautiful water running down from the mountains. They said, “Oh you got a good camp, the Barron River runs through the camp, you can swim in the river and do your washing in it,” and this chap that took us he’d taken a few loads before us and we said, “Is there any trees there?”

and he said, “What’s the matter with you blokes, there’s millions of trees,” we just liked to see some gum trees and smell them.

Yes.

Playing cards or talking. We’d never travelled in Australia before so there was plenty to look at.

Well it was and it wasn’t. You got two sides and six windows. Two can look out one window. A great experience to travel in Australia for the first time.

Pretty good.

Well, I think it was Rockhampton, the train goes through the main street of town, goes very slowly through the main street of town. There’s a big station there and we were still in khakis and all the others coming down were in their greens. There was a young kid at the station, as the train was pulling out, he looked about seventeen or eighteen in his greens,

he bellowed out, “Get the sand out of your eyes and have a look at a jungle fighter.”

Everyone had a sense of humour.

Yeah.

It was just bush cleared. Thickest jungle; thick as anywhere in else in the world apart from north Queensland. We did our jungle training there and invasion training down at Trinity Beach at Cairns. They were cleared and we built football fields and things like that

and we built huts out of bush timber with thatched roof for the mess hut. We occupied ourselves pretty well there.

Others had been there a couple of years we were in the Middle East, they had an Australian camp there.

We built a big mess hut, I’ve got a photo of it there and we built the officer’s mess like a log cabin. There’s plywood factories up there, quite a few. When the logs finished peeling the veneers off them they had about that much waste for some reason and they used to let us have them and we’d get them ripped down to half

in the middle like a log cabin. We built a great big officer’s mess for them and we built like another hut for medical, that was always a tent. One chap there, he built a boat. We used to get sawn timber from the mill

for firewood. We’d go and cut the logs for their boilers, we’d cut the two metre lengths of bush wood to fire their boilers and they’d give us timber. Daylight saving up there, before anyone else, north Queensland. An old bloke at the mill, he used to discuss things like time, daylight and that,

he’d say, “That’s Japanese time,” because of the Japs in the war they got daylight saving. We used to swim in the Barron River, take our washing down and do it while we’re in the water. We used to build, that cane grows very well up there, lawyer cane, you can get it up to about that thick. We built bridges across the river so’s we could walk across on them,

for exercise and that we had to do later on. They could even build bridges out of that cane and take vehicles across it was that strong.

Yeah. And all these staghorns and elkhorns and that we’d never seen them before. They were thick in the jungle. And the birds, birds we’d never seen.

There was the lyre bird there and the cassowary, the big cassowaries, big enough to kill a man. They’ve got the claws and very strong legs.

They feared us I think. You wouldn’t want to go and interfere with them. And bower birds, they used to make a bower, all the bright objects in the nest to attract the hen.

A lot of possums, a lot of wallabies, kangaroos, things like that.

The only difference was it was jungle. It’s different to open warfare. You can bring a big force into a certain area but up there you can’t because of the jungle.

So the 9th Division went to New Guinea from there, did the landing in Lae.

We went out and we did shoots because there was places there wasn’t jungle. There was areas up there where they had tin mining and that and it was sort of stony

hard ground and open country. We used to do the same old shoots, the same old exercises, digging gun pits. Just get it finished and move on and fill them in again. In Australia we had to fill them in again. In the desert we just left them and someone else would come up and take it. It was a bit boring in a way because we knew all that.

That’s why we did a lot of sport tournaments. We had championships and the whole Australian 9th Division, we’d have a Division Championship and there was buck jumping. Queensland were cowboy happy at the time. Every time you got a radio it was cowboy songs. “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,” that was a favourite in those days. We used to have radios.

Country race meetings. That all filled it up. And log chops, log chopping.

Something like the amateur sports now. We had races, we had all the, hundred yard sprint, the half mile and the mile, we had hurdles. A lot of the chaps were really good athletes.

You’d always get someone that’s done something. Some of them were log choppers. We had Queenslanders there, rough riders. We used to have rodeos. Civilians had the rodeos, we used to go along. We had boxing, boxing of a Sunday night. They built a proper boxing ring, the engineers, with roof over it and dressing rooms underneath. It was a great big hollow in the ground,

you could sit thousands in it.

Oh yes.

Well if you can get the guns into position, that was the biggest problem, getting them in.

They’re very heavy. The only thing was the shells, sometimes getting in close to the infantry, they’d burst in trees and shower them. They used to call us the 'drop shorts', kill your own men. If they wanted it that close, they had it.

That came from World War I.

Yes.

Yes. Partly I suppose. If they got too many casualties they wouldn’t be too happy about it. As a matter of fact, one of our own men were killed.

One of our own men were killed. He was up there directing the fire.

We had the gun tractors.

It was a truck. Especially designed for it. You hooked the limber up, put the ammunition in that like a cart, it was a steel box, the gunners could ride on top of it, in the horse days but we had the tractors, the back of the truck.

We moved up with the vehicle.

We used to carry sand trays. A long tray with perforated holes, to make it lighter. They had winches. Gun tractors all had winches on them. When we got up to sloppy stuff we had wheel chains.

Yes.

You had to man handle it. There’s pictures there of us manhandling it across the river. We’d all get on it, pull and push it. In the old days with horses you had the spoke wheels. You’d get hold of the spokes. You see the guns in

King’s Park with the wooden wheels. We’d man the spokes. We had them in the early days.

It is hard, yes.

Yes and not only that you’ve got to get your muzzle up. You’ve got to clear the trees in front of you otherwise you get a burst in front of you.

You’ve got to clear that, we had to go and chop them down with the axe. Sometimes a bit further away we used to blow them over, put a couple of shells in down low and blow them over.

Yes. I fancied myself as an axeman, I loved axework, I could do it for exercise. As a kid I was always in the bush cutting down small trees

and cutting up firewood. We were doing a training job up in north Queensland. It was a single wire, the road only went as far as Mossman, next one from Cairns. It was only a track from there to Cooktown and those places right up to the Cape, just a graded track. There was a single telephone, two wires going from the tablelands up to

there. We were having a shoot, practice up in Queensland. There was a tree in the way. Someone said, “You can drop that without hitting the telephone lines.” I said, “I’ll drop that tree anywhere, on a match, I’m that good an axeman.”

So I went out and dropped it and I dropped it right across both lines, pulled them both down. Our signals fixed it up.

We were there from 1943 and we were there until

early ’44 because in the mean time the 9th Division had gone to New Guinea. There were three regiments artillery and they could only take one and us and the other regiment were left behind. That was boredom. We had to put up with that.

Mainly sport

and we had boxing every Friday night. We used to get three pounds for a win, two for a lose and two pound ten for a draw. They used to make the money by taking the hat around boxing night. You’d hear all the bets going on. They used to bet a lot, gamble a lot. I didn’t draw any pay for months, I used to get in a fight every Friday night and

a lot of blokes were just having a go, you know but now and then you’d get someone that knew what they were. I’d done quite a lot of boxing in the militia before the war and the amateur tournament. It was easy money for me. I won more than I lost. In lightweight you don’t get knocked around that much, even if you lose.

So it was easy money. I didn’t draw any pay. You could let your pay ride in your book like a bank book if you didn’t want to draw pay.

Well, you just thought, “We’ll take it as it comes.” We heard all about the malaria, scrub typhus

and all those happening. Up until we went to Queensland they used to use quinine for malaria and that was only a cure, not a preventative. They invented this Atebrin, it’s a tablet, it makes your skin go a yellowy colour. I never got malaria because we had that Atebrin.

We had it all the time we were in Queensland. We had it in case we were going to be whipped away any minute. We were taking that for a long time before we even got there. I used to get the dengue fever which is similar to malaria, but I never got malaria. I was in the same area where they were getting it, they all used to get it before.

I don’t know of any of our chaps that got malaria.

Yeah. We had two big base hospitals up in north Queensland. They were all big tents, marquees, earth floor. I got a lot of skin troubles up there. I got boils, abscess and carbuncles.

I used to get bronchitis, that I got in the desert. When I knocked off smoking after the war I never ever had bronchitis again. I don’t even get chest colds. It’s that many years I don’t remember the last time I had a cold in the chest. About every three or four years I might get a little bit of a head sniffle.

I eat

plenty of vitamin C, and I never used to like garlic but I’d cut it up, put it in honey, have a drink of that, two or three big mouthfuls in the morning. That could be, garlic.

We eat a lot of fruit and vegetables. We eat a lot of green vegetables.

Yes. Spinach, silverbeet.

It was about

March ’44. We went down to Trinity Beach for a fortnight doing invasion training. They bought the landing craft over they used at D-day landings in France. We had some of those barges. Of course when we did the real thing we had the American

barges. We did invasion training there at Trinity Beach. We went down to the next one down from Cairns, Townsville, and boarded an American ship,

built as a troop carrier.

Yes, we had our guns on a large landing ship, it wasn’t a craft, it was big enough to be called a ship. That’s what the Elker up there was, that was turned into a ship afterwards.

It was made for big stuff like tanks and guns, trucks, everything on this landing ship. They would go out, go in, drop the ramp. Sometimes they’d drop it in water, sometimes if they could get in right on dry land, sometimes we’d get out and we were up to our waist in water,

sometimes it was deeper. They told us about how everything had to be fixed down firmly because if they hit a sandbar or something coming in, it was like hitting something in a car and going forward. They said everything will move, the guns and vehicles, everything would move if they’re not well and truly fixed down.

A Yank said, “That has happened before, it takes a lot of sawdust to clean it up.” He meant the blood. There was landing ships, infantry and others that carried ammunition, fuel. That was all

we had to do. Getting on and off again. How to load them, how to get on and how to get off.

Several times, I wouldn’t know how many but we were there for two weeks, training. Because the navy, the Australian navy, were there too, they were in the landing and they were doing the naval work, signaling and all that sort of thing.

Yes.

No. Everything went pretty smooth.

Yes.

We had exercises too of scrambling up, getting up the side of a ship, a small craft, with all your gear on, your rifle slung over your shoulder, your pack and everything.

They reckon the packs were about fifty-six pound and then you’d have your rifle. I think you’d be over sixty pound.

Clothing, mainly clothing.

Well we had a mosquito net that would fold up pretty small. We got the American boots because our boots were just ordinary boots and you’d be up to your knees in mud

We got the American boots that came up just under your knee. Quite good boots.

The ordinary type trousers and shirt.

We took our rifles.

The ones we had all along, the twenty-five pounders. They had invented a break down and pack gun, you could take it to pieces and take it to places where you can’t get in and you’d put it all together again. It didn’t have a shield like the other guns and

you got a lot more blast when you fired, no one liked it but you could get it up into places. We didn’t have all them but we had a few of them.

Oh yes. You could get them in where you couldn’t get the other guns. They even had mules for carting stuff in the jungle.

Yes.

No, we missed out on that one. We were on our way to Tarakan in Borneo. We left Townsville in an American ship built for carrying troops, no portholes in it, built in wartime. The bunks were eight deep, on chains.

You’d lower them down in the day. It was like a big cargo hold. No port holes or anything. It was tropical, hot weather. If we had of been hit by a mine or been torpedoed we would have never got out. There was that many there in this great big hold.

I think there was about two ladders to get up. On the British ships when we were travelling you could sleep on deck at night, hot in the Red Sea. The Yanks wouldn’t let you anywhere near the deck at night. We had two meals a day on the Yankee ships. We had breakfast at about four o’clock and when you came back from the galley you didn’t go up top. You had to come back down below.

I’d say about ninety per cent of the men smoked. You had this stinking hot. We laid there with nothing on, just sweating on a canvas. They had five inch guns on the deck, great big five inch guns. It was built just for carrying troops. We went from there to Morotai which is a big island up past New Guinea. There was a big base. The Yanks landed there,

they didn’t take the island they just took the part they wanted and put a perimeter round it. The Yanks were still there after the war. I think that’s the island where they found those twenty years later, a couple of Japs still living in the jungle like animals.

No it was already established, a base.

No. We went to,

the first port of call was Finschhafen in New Guinea. It’s on the bottom tip of New Guinea. We went up around and sailed along the top of New Guinea. We went to Finschhafen to refuel.

No. We stayed on the ship, We were there for about a day and a half.

Then we went right along the top of New Guinea to Morotai and that was a base to start preparing for the landing. We were there for two or three weeks.

They had the landing barges there, they were all American navy. We had practices getting on and off, same as you had in Cairns.

At times it was hard, especially with the infantry, they used to drop them off in deep water and things like that in case they had to. The place we were landing there wasn’t much in the way of beaches. The only beach there was where they cleared it for their own,

Tarakan is a large island, it’s even got mountains on it and it’s very rich in oil. The Shell oil company, Dutch, had oil rigs there. Two big oil rigs. The only beach was where they had the wharf for themselves and the landing. The Japanese had put obstacles in there

such as railway lines and things driven in to the sand to rip the bottom out of your boats coming in. So our engineers went in and blew them up. They had to do that the day before. So we landed the day before on another little island, it wouldn’t have been any more than a kilometre off the other one, a little island.

It had trees and a couple of big hills with a few Jap buildings on it but there were no Japs on it when we got there. We landed the day before.

Tarakan. Off the coast of Tarakan. We landed the day before the big landing. See they had been pounding them for days, the navy, the big naval guns. They had

their air force bombing them. We landed our guns so we could put a smokescreen, we were on the side, we put a smokescreen right down to cover these engineers going in to blow these up. That was the idea of us landing the day before.

On a little island.

We landed the day before on a smaller island.

It’s called Saidan, the one we were on. They were well and truly bombarded and the Japs, they could have wiped us out but they didn’t know, couldn’t have known we were there. The air force was bombing them

and navy, naval shells going everywhere.

Only our regiment. Only part of our regiment. Out of twenty four guns we only had eight on that island.

We have a shell that explodes and all smoke comes out of it

and it puts up a very effective smokescreen, if it’s not windy. It’ll blow the wrong way if it’s too windy. We used it a lot in the desert when somebody’s having a bad time, they wanted to retreat back, they’d call for smoke.

Yes. I don’t think there was any wind at the time. It was successful anyhow. They went in.

Well, the idea was to land on it, only a tiny beach, land and we had one company of infantry went in first and they cleared the whole island. They went over it in about a couple of hours and there was no Japs there. They had buildings there.

For some reason they weren’t there because they’d been bombarded for quite a while. They must have known it was coming because the war was getting to the stage where the Japanese had no navy and they had very little air force left. Otherwise we would never have got there, landed without a lot of trouble.

We sailed from Morotai to there

and it was about four days. Days and nights sailing and we were in sight of Mann most of the way, Japanese held territory. The Japs had all of Borneo and this was an island, it wouldn’t have been much bigger than Rottnest off the Borneo coast. They wanted that island because there was an air strip on it for fighter air craft to cover the main landings.

It was a failure. We lost a lot of lives there. It was a failure because the Japs drained a swamp onto it. The air force construction units moved in shortly after us and they had to get that airstrip working and it was after

they really wanted it they got it finished. They were trying to build an airstrip with Japanese snipers picking them off. They were working at night with search lights to get the thing done.

We left Morotai,

it was four days sailing.

We landed in the morning on this little island.

We put the smokescreen down next morning, no, that day for the engineers to go in and clear the beach of all the obstacles.

Next morning the main landing took place.

After we put the smokescreen down we could reach targets on the island too. When they called for our fire. So we stayed on that island for about three weeks until they got that far away that we couldn’t reach them from there. We came back onto Tarakan then.

It would have been, it used to be measured in ranges,

in thousands of yards. I suppose, we could land a shell anything up to about five mile, it’s a long way. This is supercharged, they had different charges for different distances and we could alter those charges, it was separate ammunition. You took the cap out of it, a cardboard cap and they

were silk bags, different colours, cordite, you’d pull the blue out. The super charge was all sealed up, you couldn’t open that. If you had to fire on heavy vehicles we used to use the super and an armour piercing shell, it didn’t explode it just went straight through them. It was all different. That’s what the gunner had to do too, set those fuses and that.

I think it took a half day, I’d say about four hours for them to clear the obstacles in the water.

Once the smoke wasn’t wanted any longer we started on ordinary targets. We had an aircraft there, a little Auster aircraft spotting for us.

When they started landing they were giving us targets too.

No, we only did the smokescreen. The navy were pounding them.

Yes, yes.

Yes. The smokescreen was the day before.

We had a grandstand view of the main landing.

We saw the craft coming in. They had rockets on the side of them, they were firing rockets as they went in. When the ramps go down the infantry go in. When the heavy stuff started going in, the artillery, the trucks with the equipment on, they were all getting bogged down. It was mud. They had quite a bit of trouble with the beach trying to get out of all the mud.

The Japs started to use a few snipers and they had artillery too. They started firing it back. Once they got ashore they started making good progress, the infantry.

No. They could have wiped us out.

I don’t think they knew we were there. What happened, all that blasting and bombing and shelling, they might have done a bit of damage but they didn’t kill many Japs because they’d been there for years, they had concrete bunkers and they had tunnels under the ground. They had to use flame throwers to get some of them out of those tunnels.

It was just the slow process of a taking the whole island. We hadn’t really captured the whole island by the time the war finished. We killed well over three hundred Japs after the war because they wouldn’t surrender.

Well, it was the usual thing.

The artillery were going and supporting the infantry and as the infantry moved up the artillery moved up.

We were firing on targets from the little island. Then when they got out of our range we were brought over to the big island.

It was quite simple, we had small navy ships, I forget what they were now, they just took us across.

There was no danger really because the Japs had been pushed back. The Japanese didn’t have any air force by then. You’ve got to remember it was the last few months of the war. The Japs had practically nothing, the navy was knocked out.

No, we just lived alongside our guns.

Yes.

It wasn’t too bad, the climate. We had mosquito nets to use at night. We got used to the tropical climate by then. It was unbearable at Morotai, it’s right on the equator. It was terribly hot.

We had ships. We even had the American Liberty ships, as they called them. They built these fast ships for supplying their army. We were getting shipments from Queensland. We were even getting beer, a bottle of beer occasionally. That used to be pretty precious.

Whatever you were doing, mostly firing guns.

Well it was pretty fierce fighting there. They lost a lot of men. I think it was round about fifty thousand rounds I think we fired and we captured a Japanese gun with a lot of ammunition in it.

A liberty captured it. [(UNCLEAR)] using that, firing back at them. In one position there they couldn’t get the Japs out of it, it was all heavy timber. It was more timber than jungle. They had caves in this big hill and they used to get them out of a place like that with flame throwers but they couldn’t get up close enough for flamethrowers. We moved to an area,

it was only about five hundred yards from them. We had two of our guns, two of the big anti aircraft guns that they could use for field guns and two big tanks. They got a few tanks in there. What we did, we blew all the trees down, opened it up and then just blasted into it. We were firing shells that penetrate before they explode into there. Then when it was safe enough

for the engineers to go in or the infantry with the flamethrowers. They used to shoot a flame as long as this room, petrol and phosphorous. A terrible weapon but one way of getting them out. When the war finished they dropped leaflets for them, but they didn’t surrender. We were told to just carry on and wipe them out.

It depends. Sometimes nothing for a while, you’d be held up. The Japs had all the advantage, they had all the high ground. At times they were that way they could just drop bombs onto us, from the infantry, straight down because they were up on mountains and that. When you’re fighting, you’re going up, it was like the Kokoda Trail, you were fighting up like that. It was hard especially when the Japs

had been there for years and they were established. Underground tunnels connecting.

Not really. It wasn’t like a straight line. The infantry where there, and the Japs were coming in, especially at night.

We always had guards at night. The idea was if you heard something, don’t give your position away, fire. They could hear the noise. There was quite a few Japs killed at night, sneaking in.

We just had the feeling we’ve got to be careful. It was all our way really. The Jap was beaten but he was determined to defend it to death and that’s what he did. They didn’t surrender, never surrender.

Yes. Well the infantry had a lot of casualties that we didn’t. We had a few but not a lot.

Well they were carried back to what they called a field dressing station.

From there they would go back to hospital. They established a hospital there, nurses.

Yes. There was also civilians there. There was a Chinese village and there was, they used to call them coolies. That was the term they used for one of those people, like seamen on ships, black races,

they used to call them coolies. The Japs had taken them from Java, it was forced labour. The Japs shot quite a lot of them in the leg so they wouldn’t go, so’s we’d have to look after them. They were happy little fellas, those Javanese. We had them working for us.

Well, say unloading ships, or carrying stuff up the tracks. When the war finished they worked for us until we went home. We didn’t get home until Christmas. Even then we were very lucky. They took the lot of us off in a big British aircraft carrier.

I think it was sometime in March until the war finished, I forget what month the Japanese were defeated, they dropped the atomic bomb,

but it was several months. We got the news there that they dropped the atomic bomb and they told us, MacArthur took his Americans to the Philippines. He was the one that told us, our General Blamey to [(UNCLEAR)] do the Borneo antics. It was a waste of time really, we could have just starved them out, a waste of a lot of lives.

No it was right until the very end. There were still Japs there. We had to get them out. There was no way they were going to surrender.

Well at times it was fairly quiet but at other time we’d be most of the day.

Occasionally, we didn’t do much night shooting there. We did in the desert, but we didn’t do much night shooting. It was all indirect in the desert, harassing fire. You knew where you could put them where they might do some damage, but there you didn’t do much night fire.

Well I’d say we were getting pretty used to it by then.

Well it was very hard because, when the casualties came back, when they got to the hospital, the nursing sisters used to say, “When these blokes get back here they sleep day and night for days.” The answer was because they don’t get any sleep anywhere else. They used

to have an hour off at night. An hour, you used to sleep nicely and it’s your turn. If you snore, which I do a lot, more now than I did then, if you’re snoring they’d say, “Shut up,” because the Japs would creep right in close. They even tried calling out names, “Charlie,” and, “Where are you?” Things like that.

Well it did for a while.

No, there wasn’t anywhere to go.

We were in several different positions. The position we were in when the war finished

was just alongside a Chinese village. Little weatherboard huts. They’d gone. There was a Chinese cemetery in front of us. It used to smell, the cemetery.

Something to do with the atmosphere and the dampness. The wild frangipanis growing there and at night time if we were on guard we used to

get a couple of flowers and roll it up in a handkerchief and put them round our necks.

Probably. The Chinese, after the bodies had been there for so long, they dig the bones up and put them in a clay pot on the top and of course with a war going on they were getting broken open. Some humorous blokes with perverted senses of humour were

sticking them up on sticks.

No, skulls.

Mmm.

I don’t know.

Oh, just had a bit of a laugh at it.

It used to help a lot.

People would come out with sayings and that, quite funny.

They announced it,

our padre told us. We thought, “It’ll be a long while before we get home from here,” because all the troops all over the whole Pacific had to go home. Luckily they took the lot of us off at once on an aircraft carrier.

Yes. We had an idea what it was.

As soon as we heard that we thought, “Well, the war is over.” The radios were going mad up there. You could pick up various from Borneo, places like that. Radios were going mad.

Yeah but couldn’t understand most of it.

No, not really.

We just thought, “Oh well, it’s over.” It’s good but, then we were told our next landing was going to be in Hong Kong.

We arrived in

Sydney three weeks before Christmas. As you can imagine, the railways trying to handle all the troops going home from Sydney, and West Australians were last. We were put in Marrickville Showground in the sheep pens, sleeping in the sheep pens, under cover.

Quite often we stayed in places like that, showgrounds.

We didn’t mind it. That’s where we used to wash our shirts under the tap, in Sydney too and put them on wet. By the time you got from Marrickville, into Sydney they were dry.

It was good because we were up on deck, sleep wherever you like up on deck. We had movies and we had all sorts of sport too and that. We used to have deck hockey and things like that.

We had quite a few films. We went to an island called Madison on the way home to refuel. We had a swim. It’s pretty high on those aircraft carriers. Some of the good divers were diving off. I wasn’t going to go in.

You get sea snakes up there. That’s no good when you’re going home.

Very good.

We used to go and wander around the city. We were getting a bit sick of that because

the beer was only on for an hour at lunch time. Sometimes it’d be an hour, five o’clock, and closed at six. We got sick of just hanging around. Been there for a few days and the padre came out one morning, we had to go back every morning to answer roll call.

Anyhow, the padre came, it was a long weekend coming up, it was before Christmas and he said, “There’s a lot of people in Sydney want to take you boys in for the weekend,” and he’d call out, “One,” or, “Two together that like horse riding. Two together that like swimming.” So I said

to one of my friends next to me, “That’s us. Two that like swimming.” They gave you a card with the person’s name and phone number on it. It was Coogee, right on the beach, pretty wealthy people. We went into the town and we rang her. She said, “Where are you boys from?” We said, “Borneo,” and she said, “Well come out as soon as you can. My son’s still up there.” He must have been one, they left a few back that hadn’t been there very long.

He was only young, he hadn’t been in the army long. Some had to stay there with all the equipment. They came home later with all our equipment. She said, “He’s still up there.” We went out there for the weekend and stayed three weeks. She didn’t want us to go.

We had Christmas and New Year there.

We had parties.

Things were rationed, everything was rationed then. They’d have so many bottles of this and that. There was a big one at the Wynyard station, there’s a hotel on the station and down in the basement, a very big pub. There was a big queue there to get whatever they had going and they had a bloke going up and down saying, “There’s three bottles of wine and one bottle of brandy,” or something like that.

We used to go along and see what we could get.

It was right on the ocean. We used to go down swimming.

Yes.

Yes.

I joined up with him. I was with him in the militia.

Yeah.

We got home just after New Year’s. I got my discharge on the tenth of January.

Yes. Had to go down to Graylands, at the camp there. They wouldn’t let me out for about three weeks because they couldn’t get a clear chest x-ray. I’ve never had trouble with my chest since. My chest is still perfect.

They x-rayed your chest. They were pretty quick, the x-rays.

I can tell you one funny instance when we joined up. There was a big crowd of us and they put us into a big room to get a urine sample. They give us these beakers. When you’re in a big room like that, people are a bit nervous and they just can’t do it and they were saying, “Put some in mine would you, put some in mine.” This is to test us for [(UNCLEAR)].

Well they couldn’t get it clear. They never thought of putting me in hospital or anything like that just, “Come back tomorrow, come back tomorrow.” I had the bronchitis bad then.

Mm

I went into the company where I worked, to the chap that used to be in charge of the apprentices there, “Oh, you’re back.” “Yeah.”

“When are you starting work?” Over five and a half years mind you, ten and a half year apprenticeship. I said, “About three weeks,” and he said, “Three weeks?” I said, “I haven’t had a holiday in years. I’ve got to have a holiday.” I was a bit cheeky when I got back. I thought the buggers had put it over me like that, I don’t care what. Veterans Affairs made up our wages up to tradesman rates

which was a big help.

Well, it was very strange you know. A few of the old chaps had died. There were new ones. There were even apprentices that had started their time after I left, had finished. There were very few of the ones left there that came back from the forces with me.

Most of them were younger than me and they might have only done two or three years in the forces.

The usual, just lay around. It was very hard to walk past the pub.

You’d got to the pub in the morning and you might stay there all day.

Yeah. It was very hard to settle down because you were with those blokes for over five years and all of a sudden they were gone. The army and the navy, they were posted around a bit. If a chap in the navy went on leave he went back to another ship usually.

The air force, they shift them for one unit to another for some reason, I don’t know. But the army, you stayed where you were unless you put in for a transfer somewhere, which didn’t happen very often. An older brother could claim a younger brother for the unit. Apart from that, you lived together day and night. It was very hard to get back to the cut lunch at work. It was the excitement,

although it wasn’t all good, it was the lot of excitement. When you got from one country to another, you probably get the wanderlust. That’s why I never settled down in a job. I lost count of the jobs I had. Five or six years, “Oh, I’ll get out of this, go somewhere else.” I’m still a bit like that but we came here, this was our twenty ninth move in fifty odd years,

different houses. We didn’t buy them all but quite a few of them, some of them were rentals. Being in the building trade you could do a home up and sell it and make a bit on it. We had five kids, I worked seven days a week all year, Marie worked too. We had five kids all going to school at once, it wasn’t easy. They don’t want one pair of footy boots, they want three and two hockey sticks.

It was very hard. Back to work as an apprentice again. I know we got our pay made up, tradesman rates, but it was so boring after the life I’d had. I think you miss that bit of excitement, moving from one country to another, moving around a lot.

There was always a bit of excitement. It wasn’t always good but a lot of it was good. I got that way, I could never settle in a job for long. I had to move on, try something else. I finished my apprenticeship and I worked for a while in the trade. In that time I’ve earned my living as a carpenter,

a joiner (two separate jobs), cabinetmaker, car wagon builder in the railways, a chef, several labouring jobs, because the money was good, just ordinary labouring, seasonal but the money’s good. How I come to be a chef, there was a big boom in the building trade here

when they built the oil refinery at Kwinana and to build that oil refinery they needed housing for their staff. The government had to build houses and Medina was born then, that new suburb, Medina. We had a lot of migrants from all over Europe mainly at the time. It was 1953 I think.

The company I worked for, they’re still going. We did seven days a week and a couple of hours overtime each day. We built the construction camp for the workers building the refinery and then we went building the houses. When we doing the construction camp we were on a flat rate, a bonus, but when we went out to Medina they split us up in gangs. Instead of doing your whole job

one gang did stumping, all timber frame houses, putting the stumps in, next one was wall frames, next one the roof, then the sheeting, outside sheeting, inside sheeting, the fixing for doors and windows. I got, me and two mates, got into the roofing gang. We were doing three roofs a week. They weren’t big houses, they were two bedroom and a back sleepout, we used to have in those days, average family man’s home.

We made very good money for a while and then, they were that short of builders after the war, they were short of builders as well as material to build with, they decided to let people have a

builder’s ticket, what they called a Conditional, you didn’t have to pass any exams, you had to have a certificate, a reference from a registered builder who was in the association. Of course, we all got references and we got in on this Conditional Builder. We’re doing fairly well, we’re allowed to tender for work up to four thousand pounds. That was the average man’s home in those days, four thousand pounds.

We did several state housing, in those days we called it state housing, and then we got on, we could do brick homes, we got on to tendering for war service housing. We had about three good years, we all got brand new cars, we all had mortgages and we all had kids.

Well, do you want me to tell you the whole story?

She lived in the next street to me. I’ve got a younger sister that Marie used to knock around with a bit.

I wouldn’t have known Marie because I left home, I wasn’t home much after I turned about twenty and she’s a lot younger than me. I wouldn’t even have taken any notice of her if I did see her at our place. I was away, I’m not too sure whether I was away in the Middle East or I went up to the islands, but she came round to our place

one day and she saw that photo of me on the wall and she said, “Who’s that?” and my sister said, “That’s Fred.” “Who’s Fred?” She said, “That’s our brother.” She said it went through her mind, “That’s the bloke I’d like to marry,” and it wasn’t until

after the war and I got home that I was told about Marie. I still didn’t meet her for twelve months and one night, she worked in a hospital, just over in the bush, it’s the annex now, it was only a little

weatherboard hospital and a girl who worked with her got off the last train and we were coming home on the last train and we could hear this squealing outside. It was a track, through the bush, across to the hospital and someone had given this girl a fright and we went running out there. I was the first one there and she told us what happened. She said, “I work over at the hospital.”

I said, “I’ll walk you home.” So naturally, a good looking girl, I said, “What about meeting me one night?” I told her my name was Fred, that’s all. She couldn’t go for some reason and she wanted to try and get my name so she was running round asking everyone,

“Who knows a boy in Shenton Park looks a bit like…” one of the film stars, “…Alan Ladd?” because I was about his, he was fairly short, I reckon I was his double. Said, “I think I know.” Nothing came of that. Then on a river trip one night with all my mates,

a boat on the river, it was the Emblem, it wasn’t that big, the bar would have been smaller than this room. It was a river trip at night. We’re all down in the bar and Marie went on this trip with a chap she didn’t want to go with. A friend at work talked her into it. She said, “I’ll go if you go too.” Anyhow, she was a bit bored on the boat and it was a

pretty cold night on the river. It was summer but it got cold. We’re all down in the bar. She knew one of the blokes I was with. I’d never actually met Marie, I’d had her pointed out to me a couple of times. So she said, “It’s cold. My nanna always said to have a port wine to warm you up.” She was only about nineteen herself and she said to this chap, “Are you twenty one?” “Of course I’m twenty one.” So they go down to the bar

and here’s all the Shenton Park boys, of course it’s not long before she was standing right next to me, claiming me. Anyhow, from then on, I took her home that night and her father said, very strict, “Who did you come home with last night?” It was me,

my father’s name was Clem, his second name was Clement, but they used to call him Clem. He said, “Old Clem hasn’t got a son,” she said, “Yes, he has.” He said, “He’s married,” and she said, “Well he’d better not be.” Anyhow, we got engaged a few months after that. I always told her she’d been stalking me

for all those years. That’s how it happened.

The first one, Cedric, we call him Rick. He was born on our first wedding anniversary.

The second girl, Dicksie, she was born on our third wedding anniversary, so there’s two birthdays on a wedding anniversary, the twenty first of February, which is amazing. Then, Geoff was born a few years later and Trevor. Dawn was the last.

They’re all married. All their marriages have lasted. Thirteen grandchildren altogether. They’re mostly in the eastern states. One grandson was born in America.

Trevor was the youngest boy. The three boys all did over twenty years in the air force each. Trevor was in Missouri he went over with the FA18 fighter aircraft. They were buying it from America and he went over there to work on that. After his time in the air force he started off working for Transfield.

They were building the navy ships in Williamstown, Victoria. He was in charge of all the electronics on the weaponry. The Anzac was one he did. He worked on several. He got the Australia Day award.

Yes. How that happened. I was talking about, we got a building ticket and we did very well. When that finished there was a big slump in the building trade and there was no work anywhere so we broke up. We shared our equipment, we didn’t go broke. I was going up three hundred mile

up in sheep station country, Mount Magnet. They were getting enormous prices for their wool at that time. They all wanted to build new homesteads because they were all timber frame houses, corrugated walls and roofs and they had trees and lawns all around and they wanted to build a new homestead on the site. So they demolished the old homesteads. They had enormous shearing sheds and quarters

for shearers to live in. I went up there with a chap who was building these homes. We lived in the shearer’s quarters. He did two homesteads up there but away from home, about three hundred and eighty kilometers to travel. You went home for a weekend about every two or three weeks, all that driving. The gravel roads from Wugen on,

two hundred miles of corrugated gravel.

That was when we decided, Marie said, “Why don’t you see if you can get back in the army for a while until this all blows over?” I know a few blokes who are permanent army. It’s a pretty good racket. I said, “Oh yes, I wouldn’t mind.” I went along and I was thirty seven and really fit and they said, “You’re miles too old for the army.”

After all the experience I’d had, “You’re miles too old for the army.” I said, “What about the navy?” and they said, “You’re miles too old for the navy. Go in that door there, the air force will take you.” I went in there and he said, “You’re getting a bit long in the tooth but you could be a steward or a general hand or a cook’s assistant.” That was the bottom pay group, those three, but he said

“I advise you to take on the cooking because you can get another trade behind you and it’s very easy to pick up.” He said, “It’s not long before you get to be a cook. If you’re keen to get on you can get a promotion easy enough.” I said, “Right.” I went over to Sydney, Richmond, New South Wales, to do the recruit course, learning rifle drill,

marching and all this, hand grenades and Bren guns. What a waste of money, but I had to do it. I was away from home for three months then and I came back and I was lucky to get a posting to Pearce here and I was there for the whole six years.

It wasn’t long before I got my cook’s trade group. It’s common sense cooking, I picked it up very quickly.

It wasn’t long before I got my corporal, then I got my sergeant. I would have been equal to a good carpenter outside when I got the sergeant’s plus the perks and a nice easy job. I went from nine and a half stone to thirteen stone seven in eight months.

Yes. I was in the sergeant’s mess

for a while and they put me in charge of the sergeant’s mess just when the Duke of Edinburgh came over for the Commonwealth Games at Perry Lake. He came on his own, didn’t bring the Queen with him. He stayed in the officer’s mess up there and they’d just put me in charge of the officer’s mess. There were no complaints. Everything went all right. I signed on for six years and I thought, “Oh, I wouldn’t mind doing another six.” This was after I’d been in a few months.

Yeah. I could have signed up for twelve. I thought I could always re-engage another six. By that time I’d done my six years and I thought I needed a change, you know, building trade going well again. So, I heard of a job going at the Mount Lily Golf Club. Live-in caretaker, caterer, flat, family,

catering’s your own little business. They supplied the kitchen and all the equipment and all you had to do was supply the food and the labour and do the caretaker’s work too. We were there for one season, almost a year. It wasn’t a bad thing. I think the kids did better than us out of it, finding golf balls, caddying, some of them brought golf balls back to the players. Anyhow

after we decided to build another house. I got my deferred pay, got a deposit on the house, bought a block of land and built a house in Cloverdale area, Melbourne area there. I went on the state ship as a cook, that was excellent money. Fremantle to Darwin run, but it’s so hot, summer.

You started drinking a bit too much there because the unions were very strong, your overtime was more than your wages. Rackets, you know, you got extra for this, extra for that but it was so monotonous. The ports weren’t worth going ashore, even Darwin wasn’t much in those days. I did a couple of trips and I thought, “I’ve got to get out of this.” So I pulled out of it and I went back to the building trade again.

Yes. Coming off the ship.

I came home on the Nieuw Amsterdam, it had just got into Fremantle, the bigger ones had to stay outside. Coming down there was a bit of congestion and they held me up the top and

they said, “You can go now.” I had kitbag on me shoulder, pack on me back, respirator, gas mask on me chest. I was coming down there, I just started coming down and I saw a chap that joined up with us but he was sick when we went overseas and he stayed behind and he called out to me, he was still in the army. I had a great big grin on my face just as this chap was setting up his camera and it was the newsreel,

the movie. It was playing all over Australia and I never, ever saw it.

I don’t know, it was just covering the war.

I think it was, CineSound, was it?

People used to tell me. This was after the war. That was 1943 and it came on fairly quick after that. I had a young nephew, he wasn’t very old, he yelled out, “There’s uncle Fred.” People were telling me, “I saw you.” Next thing I know it was nearly fifty years later and people are ringing me up saying, “You’re on telly[television].”

John Singleton made this newsreel which played all over Australia. It was the Commonwealth Government’s”Buy Australian Goods.” That song had just come out then, ‘True Blue’, John Williamson was singing it right through. Thompson, the Australian actor, Jack Thompson was doing the narrating. It goes through

all sorts of events like sporting events, people fighting bush fires and they show flashes of the war, different places and this was me coming down the gangway of a ship.

That photo was taken off the tape.

That was taken off the tape. They would have got that from the archives.

Yes. I’m in the RSL [Returned and Services League]. I’m in the 2/7th Field Regiment Association. I’m in the Air Force Association.

Everyone here is in the Air Force Association. You don’t have to be in the air force because it’s an air force association village

and the RSL, they help you a lot for getting disabilities [pensions] and your own unit association, it’s Australia wide and we have newsletters, about every quarter now a newsletter comes out. Ours goes to the eastern states and the eastern states’ comes here.

All the news of what’s going on. Most of my best mates are South Australians and I never saw any or even heard much of any of them for forty eight years and someone told me one of my best mates was coming over. He said, as he’s walking from the aircraft towards the

terminal there, he said he picked me out of the crowd, he said he could see it was me. We didn’t seem to have changed much. He still had his black hair. I wasn’t very bald then. From then on we used to keep in touch. We’ve driven across the Nullarbor five times and gone by train three

in the twenty four years I’ve been retired. They come over here. We stay in their place. Most of them are gone now, there’s not too many of them left. Their camp was Woodside just out of Harbour in South Australia. They’ve got a

plaque there with the regiment written on it. Every year around Anzac day, not on Anzac day but the Sunday nearest to it, they have a memorial service there and it’s still an active army camp. They let us use the sergeant’s mess and we have a meal there. That’s an artillery regiment there too.

It’s very important. You remember all the ones you’ve lost and you get together. I go into the RSL club in Perth. One time, Anzac day, even the little corner shops weren’t allowed to open before twelve while the service was on, but now it’s open everything, even football.

The RSL club in Perth, they’ve got a licensed club there, and they start at five o’clock in the morning, for people going to the dawn service to go and have a beer. Of course there’s all the younger ones now like the Vietnam blokes, they’re a lot younger than us although some of them look older, a lot younger than us and all the service men and women, the ones serving now, they all get in there for the march and the place is packed. They even have a

big trough of stubbies [small bottles] and cans [of beer], troughs of ice up the sideline with a big tarpaulin up and there’s about half a dozen of those plastic, portable toilets, the real good ones, you can even flush them. I don’t know how much money they make that day, they’re always a bit short of cash but they must have a big day that day. They’re flat out. If you go into the

club house itself it’s a very big area and they’re about six deep round the bar and you’ve got to wait until you see someone moving out and try and move in. We had three or four beers before the march and then we go back afterwards then we come back here to our bar, have a lunch there. At one time, we always went, the association, there’d be hundreds of us and we always used to go to a place afterwards and have lunch

and carry on there. It’s gradually dwindled down to a few in a hotel because our members now would be gone from hundreds to about, I think we have forty left. I wasn’t the youngest but I was pretty close to the youngest.

It’s a day to go and think of your mates and it’s a good thing for kids, to teach the young people. I remember last year, a little girl holding a card up saying, “Thank you for our freedom,” on it. School children come here before Anzac day.

They come here and talk to us. I’m going to a high school next week, the kids are doing projects on it. They get me to go there and there’s an army, navy and air force there. Two at a time come in and have a talk to you and ask you questions for their project.

It’s keeping Anzac day alive.

It’s good. I think it’s really good.

It’s hard to say. You don’t know what’s in the future, with terrorism, it’s a lot different to war. I think myself that

it’s going to go for a long time yet.

Well I think they’ve always been pretty good that way. We’ve always had a big crowd. I remember going marching in the boy scouts with World War I men. That was in the 1920’s, the war didn’t finish

until 1918. I was at school and they were saying, it might have been twelve or fifteen years after Gallipoli and I used to think, “Gee, that’s a long time.”

At one time I used to go and it was

always a case of roll into bed as soon as I got home but now, you know you’re getting older and a bit more sense and you’ve got to look after your health a bit more, although I don’t think beer will ever kill me because I was drinking since I was fifteen. I still have a drink every night, every time I go out anywhere, like over to the club Friday night I have probably three beers. I never get to the stage, I’ve got to the age where

I can reach contentment before capacity.

Yes.

Yep.

I don’t know really,

I don’t know what to say.

There’s the good and the bad and we always remember the good and try to put the bad behind us. There is a lot of good times.

I’ve enjoyed every bit of it.